January 4, 2005
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Artist and Author Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, presents Comix 101 at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Art Spiegelman
- Comix 101
- An illustrated exploration of the history of comics
- Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize winning creator of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers
- The Idee Levitan Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Endowed Lecture
- Monday, February 7 / 8 pm
- UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $20 / UCSB students $15
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author Art Spiegelman will present the illustrated talk Comix 101 on Monday, February 7 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. This event is the Idee Levitan Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Endowed Lecture. Patrons are to be alerted that Spiegelman will smoke during his presentation.
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, 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. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.”
Having rejected his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College before joining the underground comics movement.
As creative consultant for Topps Candy from 1965-1987, Spiegelman designed Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items, and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 1980 Spiegelman founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife Françoise Mouly. His work has since been published in many periodicals including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. He has since published a children’s book entitled Open Me...I’m a Dog, as well as the illustration accompaniment to the 1928 book The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March.
Spiegelman is working on the libretto and the sets for a new opera about the history of comics entitled Drawn to Death: A Three Panel Opera with composer Phillip Johnston. He currently edits Little Lit, a series of comics anthologies for children, and has recently completed Kisses from New York, an anthology of his New Yorker work. The third in the Little Lit series is It Was a Dark and Silly Night. In September 2004 Pantheon Books released a book of his series of broadsheet-sized color comics pages In the Shadow of No Towers. These highly political works were originally published in a number of European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books. The collection was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004. USA Today calls the book “provocative and partisan. But it’s also very personal. Spiegleman offers his fears, his horror and his anger for everyone to see.”
The New York Times Magazine claims, “Art Spiegelman...to the comics world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others.”
Prior to her death in 1997 calligrapher, painter and poet Idee Levitan-Maxted contributed a generous endowment to the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. The Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture Series was established in recognition of her gift. It will ensure that visiting scholars are brought to campus annually to discuss the relationship between the disciplines of art, philosophy and science as well as the creative processes that bridge the disciplines.
Art Spiegelman is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Tickets for the event are $20 for the general public and $15 for UCSB students, who must show valid ID when purchasing tickets and at the door. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.