About BLT
Barbara Lane Tharas (they/them) is an artist based in Emporia and Lawrence, Kansas. They earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas A&M–Corpus Christi in 2016 and are an MFA candidate at the University of Kansas. Over the past decade Tharas has exhibited nationally, including nine solo exhibitions and numerous juried shows. Their practice centers on sequential formats—comics, animation, and printmaking—as primary strategies for making and presenting work.
Artist Statement
My work uses sequential media and print processes to combine humor with critique. Drawing from comics, animation, and printmaking, I create narratives and images that confront anti-fat bias, mental health stigma, and narrow conventional beauty standards while also honoring queerness and my Mexican heritage. Sequential formats allow me to stage recurring characters, visual gags, and repeated motifs that build momentum across frames and editions; repetition creates space for both punchline and reflection.
Printmaking gives my work a material and communal dimension: editions, multiples, and the trace of hand in ink emphasize reproducibility and accessibility, resisting singular fetishization of the object. Comics and animation provide temporal pacing and voice—timing, gutters, and panel-to-panel transitions become rhetorical tools for satire, empathy, and rupture. Humor functions as an entry point: it disarms and invites viewers to recognize the structures that shape body politics, mental health narratives, and cultural belonging. Through playfulness and persistence, the work seeks to make visible the ordinary rhythms of queerness and Mexican identity, interrupting exclusionary norms without erasing complexity or pain.
In combining these modes I aim to balance critique with celebration. The works are at once personal and collective—situated in my experiences and shaped by broader social forces. They ask viewers to reconsider assumptions, to laugh and feel alongside characters who insist on existing fully and unapologetically.