An Evening With Art Spiegelman & Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute is an American literary scholar, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, and the comics and graphic novels columnist for The New York Times Book Review. She is also the Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and the author or editor of seven titles on comics, including her book Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. It is hard to overstate the effect of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman on postwar American culture. Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art – and has often been at the center of debate, such as its recent ban from school language arts curricula in McMinn County, Tennessee. Richly illustrated with images from Spiegelman’s work, Maus Now: Selected Writing (Pantheon) collects responses to the work from writers such as Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, and Ruth Franklin, who examine it from various viewpoints and traditions. Organized into three loosely chronological sections – “Contexts,” “Problems of Representation,” and “Legacy” – Maus Now offers translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time.

Art Spiegelman is one of the world’s most admired and beloved comic artists, best known for his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, Maus. Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman began studying cartooning in high school and drawing professionally at age 16; he studied art and philosophy before joining the underground comics movement in the 1960s. He taught history and the aesthetics of comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1979 to 1986, and with his wife, Françoise Mouly, in 1980, he founded the avant-garde comics magazine Raw. Among the many honors he received, in 2018 he became the first comics artist to receive the Edward MacDowell Medal. Spiegelman has exhibited his work at museums around the world, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (Pantheon Graphic Library) is a reprint of his legendary 1978 collection. It’s seminal work that changed how comics are made and appreciated. Breakdowns opens with an intimate and experimentally daring autobiographical introduction; the second part presents a facsimile of the collection of the artist’s comics of the 1970s.