Category: interns

(This post is by Elijah Reddick, a History intern who worked in Special Collections in the Fall 2022 semester. ) 

By Elijah Reddick

The Collection Itself

The majority of my internship in UNC Asheville’s Special Collections was spent working on the David Cohen Cartoon Collection which was donated to the archive in November 2021. I organized and described David Cohen’s collection of hand drawn cartoons on an item level description within a finding aid. This meant looking at each cartoon individually and describing it based on personal judgment and trying to convey what the cartoon is trying to display visually and contextually. The top priority while describing the collection was to keep in mind the audience for the finding aid and to remember that David Cohen himself still wanted to access his collection after the initial donation. This meant not only creating a finding aid more personal to David for ease of use but also creating a finding aid that would help guide future researchers in their own personal projects.

The Cohen Collection consists of sixteen boxes so far with a majority of the boxes holding folders up to fifteen folders with ten cartoons in each, with exception to a few folders which have more than ten cartoons in them due to us wanting to keep certain time periods in sequential order. The cartoons are all hand drawn on a variety of materials including cardstock and regular sheet paper, the cartoons are also largely in black and white with use of a marker and pencil. Some cartoons display work with color and small uses of inlay materials to display patterns on objects or backgrounds.

David Cohen: A Drawn-Out Mind

David Cohen is an Asheville based artist/musician and resident of over forty years. He primarily draws editorial cartoons and commissioned cartoons for various outlets and companies. His cartoon work spans various subjects ranging from local issues based in Asheville to more national political events and even to one off, word play oriented jokes. His work has been recognized by media outlets such as USA today and his work is very well known in the local Asheville area. David Cohen has been drawing cartoons for the Asheville Citizen-Times Newspaper for seventeen years and also contributed cartoons the Greenline Express a predecessor to the Mountain Xpress.

I had the amazing opportunity to interview with David Cohen during my internship and asked him questions about what motivates him to draw cartoons and specifically about why he chooses the subjects he does. He told me so many things about Asheville, and as someone relatively new to the area is wildly intriguing, such as the Bele Chere festival and its hectic but also tourist-attracting atmosphere David parodies in a number of his cartoons. We also talked about the presence of religion in his cartoons and how often David pokes fun or finds pleasure in investigating the more controversial sides of certain faiths. David draws cartoons about a number of sensitive topics but he does so in a way that draws attention to the matter and provides enough context within the cartoon that it provides the viewer with a curiosity to go and investigate that topic more.

David Cohen also conducted a TED Talk in Asheville some years ago about his career. Link to Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avE5i5QIgA

National Politics and The Meaning of an Editorial Cartoonist

David Cohen’s cartoons touch on many topics both national and local in nature. There are even times where David goes into international news, whether that be talking about a foreign regime or national disaster, David Cohen has incredibly varied subject matter. National politics and specifically an interest in our three branches of government in the U.S. is where we see a vast majority of the cartoons in our collection residing, especially in the early to mid 2000’s. The political cartoons touch on gay marriage, religion in government, and the short comings of specific politicians. Since David Cohen is an editorial cartoonist these depictions of politicians and other public figures are done so in a caricatured manner with exaggerated features.

If you look earlier in our collection of David Cohen cartoons you will see a leaning away from such political cartoons and start to see a less politicized humor being created. Many of the cartoons pre-2000 are one off jokes or secular in topic, with many of the cartoons involving wordplay, historical references, or puns.

David’s Contribution to Asheville Through His Work

Perhaps the most influential and impactful part of the David Cohen collection are his cartoons that depict events and stories told within the local area of Asheville, NC. David covers topics specific to Asheville or topics that public opinion highlights such as houselessness, tourism, changing demographics, and local politicians. David Cohen’s local cartoons provide a  local sphere of relatability and culture to long standing residents of Asheville, NC which is vital in a town that relies so much on exterior tourism and influence. David Cohen’s vast timespan of collected cartoons also archive and document Asheville’s local history in of itself, enabling a person who decides to look through the collection to see a timeline of important events, figures, and even public policies that have shaped Asheville into the city we see today.

What This Internship Has Meant to Me

My internship at UNCA Special Collections and the experience it has given me has grown so many of my professional skills while also changing how I think about archives. It has given me more than what I expected in terms of hands-on experience, collaborative efforts, and concepts around handling and describing a collection. It has provided me with challenges that confronted my writing skills, personal bias, and even morals when it came to what we put within a finding aid about the subject at hand; whether it be about word choice or censoring a topic for the potentially offensive nature of it. This is not to say that there was an active effort to censure the collection but it is to say that what you put in a finding aid and what you see in person can be different in order to maintain professionalism and a sense of academic sustainability within a setting such as Special Collections. This internship and specifically this collection taught me eventually to not describe the humor within a cartoon but to describe the significance of the cartoon, what does the cartoon give us in respect to its context, setting/environment, and even characters? Through David Cohen’s incredible storytelling skill and illustration along with the mentors I have been lucky to work with at the UNCA Special Collections Department I realized just how much individual local figures mean to a community like Asheville. Both in terms of creating and archiving works of historical value, it’s figures like these that maintain a culture of a place so multi-dimensional such as the one we reside in today.

Sources

All cartoons are from the David Cohen Collection, D.H Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville.

(Note: The finding aid for the David Cohen Cartoon Collection will be online in early 2023. )