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Ticket Giveaway: Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus @ The Corcoran

April 30, 2009 by Cale

We’re super stoked to have a pair of tickets to this event.  If you’d like to go just comment below and we’ll email the winner on Friday.

Presenting Art Spiegelman at the 2009 Argentina Copello Dudley Memorial Lecture Monday, May 4 at 7 p.m. Members $20, Public $25 Corcoran Gallery of Art 500 Seventeenth Street NW Washington, DC 20006 http://www.corcoran.org/ More info/buy tickets

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus— which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. In his lecture “Comix 101″ Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way the brain works.”

Rejecting his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at 16. He studied art and philosophy before becoming part of the underground comix subculture of the 60s and 70s. A creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co., Spiegelman created Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelties, and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York. Years later, he taught a Masters of the Comics seminar at Columbia University.

In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly—Maus was originally serialized in the pages of RAW. His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003.

In 2004 he completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages, In the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books. A book version was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004.

Spiegelman’s most recent work includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology, Breakdowns; it includes an autobiographical comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself, entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; as well as a new children’s book, Jack and the Box. Additionally, in preparation is a book with a DVD about the making of Maus, entitled Meta Maus. A major exhibition of his work was held the by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the “15 Masters of 20th Century Comics” exhibit.

Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and—the American equivalent—played himself on an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2008.
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“Spiegelman has become one of The New Yorker’s most sensational artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images once unimaginable in the magazine of old moneyed taste … From his Holocaust saga in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the The New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman’s cartoons don’t fool around.”
— Los Angeles Times

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