George Griffin & Nora Griffin

TIME CAFÉ

July 9 - August 7, 2026

I try to get at the philosophical nut embedded in the animation process, but I also attempt to pay spoken homage to emotional content and the therapeutic quality of laughter; silly cartoons do have a place in my life, much larger than I was ever able to admit.

--George Griffin, Animation World Magazine, 1997

FIERMAN is thrilled to announce TIME CAFÉ, a two-person exhibition featuring experimental animator and filmmaker George Griffin (b.1943) and his daughter, painter Nora Griffin (b.1982). Opening on July 9, the exhibition traces a visual sensibility rooted in a familial love of all things New York City, abstract art, and irreverent humor: Kurt Schwitters meets Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. George Griffin, a foundational figure in the 1970s avant-garde animation scene, has made dozens of personal short films that have screened at international film festivals, on television, and at premier venues such as Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, Metrograph, and the Museum of Modern Art. His work will be included in the upcoming MoMA exhibit It’s Alive: A Century of Animation from the Collection opening on August 1. In addition to his films, he has made artist books, flipbooks, commercial animation in the 1980s and 90s, and graphics and merchandise that utilize a cut and paste post-modern aesthetic. George grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee and has lived and worked in Lower Manhattan since 1967. Nora grew up absorbing her dad’s art practice in the family’s loft, a raw space that was divided between animation studio and living area. Her paintings are mostly abstract, but also refer to photography, ancient art, and pop imagery. She has had 4 solo shows with FIERMAN and is included in Plants, Animals and Sky at CANADA this summer. 

The exhibition title, TIME CAFÉ is taken from a beloved restaurant on Lafayette Street, in the heart of the NoHo neighborhood that was formative for both artists – one as an adult making his first mature films in the 1970s, and one as a child in the 1980s coming into consciousness. The centerpiece of the show is a wall of small (5”x7”) drawings, a daily practice for George who is now in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and finds drawing to be the easiest and fastest way to express his rambling mind. Faces--whether human, animal, or something in between, have always fascinated George. His 1975 film Head dealt entirely with the mutable, often hilarious, dimensions of his own visage. The “square man” has been a mask-like creature that has inhabited many of his animations, as both an everyman and a stand-in for the artist. A monitor in the gallery will present a looped selection of George’s animated work, including Head and The Club (both 1975), Lineage (1979), KO-KO (1986) and A Little Routine (1994), his paean to the bedtime rituals of childhood/parenthood. The 1976 film Viewmaster will be shown in a sculptural wooden mutoscope, one in a series the artist has been making for over a decade. A hand crank will allow the viewer to animate the cycle of characters forwards and backwards at their own pace. Nora will show a selection of oil paintings that both align with and take-off from her father’s aesthetic. Both Griffins make references in their art to Eadweard Muybridge’s animal locomotion series; the running cat motif has featured prominently in Nora’s paintings, and George has used the iconic man-in-motion to illustrate the everyday magic of the moving image.  Philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes in his book Non-things that “the warmth of the hands is passed on to the things.” This sentiment is embodied in the practice of father and daughter, through playful meta-references to their own handiwork and in their insistence on the materiality at the heart of art making.

Nora Griffin on Time Café, 2026

My father and I both make drawings, and this has been the case for as long as I remember.  I make mine in a notebook that I carry with me, and I do not rip them out of the notebook. I also have writing, lists, memories, ephemera, and notes that share space with the drawings. My dad uses only black ink, and works in two sizes, 5”x7” and 4”x6”, and he works fast: scratchy faces and bodies morph into alien cityscapes, with full abstraction taking over at times. Sometimes letters, words and numbers punctuate his images. There is a cubist sensibility in which all is thrown up in the air and reshuffled as it settles. They are very much urban drawings--I cannot imagine them being made in the silence of the country. He prefers to make his drawings sitting on Pier 57 at the Hudson River, a few blocks from where he lives with my mom. My dad sees these small drawings as fragments of a cacophonous narrative he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps like a storyboard, once laid out against the stability of a wall they will begin to tell a story. Drawing for him is always about sequence, a movement in time from one beat to the next. This makes sense because he is a filmmaker, and the final form is the moving image, ideally projected onto a screen in a dark theater with human beings quietly sitting together. 

My family lived in a loft on East 4th Street, in a space always flooded with sunlight, the glint of the silver twin towers and the rows of green cacti my mom placed like sentinels by the window. A single industrial column lit from behind held the space together. I watched 1980s cartoons like Smurfs and the Secret of NIMH with headphones on while my dad worked on KO-KO (1988), an abstract interpretation of a Charlie Parker song set to jumping beans and collaged newspaper bits and pieces. Across the street was (and still is) the “Old Merchant’s House”, one of the last intact 19th century homes in the city, complete with all the original furnishings of the wealthy family that occupied it for decades before it became a museum. A few doors down from our home was the new wave/punk clothing store Screaming Mimi’s; Kiki Kogelnik’s fabulously designed restaurant NoHo Star; the grubby 40s era Jones Diner; the gleaming monoliths of Tower Records (and later Video); and Keith Haring’s pink neon-lit Pop Shop. The Time Café kept watch over it all.  I absorbed the unique dazzle of these spaces as a child and felt their energy as analogous to the way a medieval villager would feel in the presence of a stained glass decorated cathedral. The wide boulevard of Lafayette even to this day reminds me of another city, a city of memory, a place where it’s always a little dark and rainy with traffic lights bouncing off stone facades, and a saxophone echoes down an alley. With wild imagination I can make the giant billboards displaying AI-generated faces transform back into the REVS COST street art of my childhood. 

The cartoons were felt first by me as moving colors, less as characters, more as a flow: teal, orange, bright blue, and blinding red. The classical hits of Warner Bros, the road runner, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, gave way later to the romance of Walt Disney, and the punk rock grotesqueries of Ren & Stimpy. My dad creates his own cartoon characters, sometimes based on people, sometimes based on animals, and they are like the wayward adolescents of their big studio parents. A sweeter version of R. Crumb’s debased zap comix or at least less obviously self-hating. The one time we collaborated was on his 1994 film A Little Routine, a reverie on parenting, nighttime terrors, and complete with bouncy references to Robin Hood, slimy toothpaste, and dream jungle beasts. My voice was recorded for the film when I was 6 years old, but the film was finally made when I was around 11, and I recall the process taking place in his animation studio, the frames and frames of drawings, the sound syncing, and moments when it all came together like magic.