Cartoonists Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes are joined by artist Anton van Dalen for an intimate conversation on cartooning, drawing, and the art of Saul Steinberg. Comic scholar Hillary Chute leads this conversation which is presented on the occasion of the exhibition Along the Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg.

About the Speakers

Chris Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1967. Known for his New Yorker magazine covers, he’s hailed as a master of the comic art form. Ware’s complex graphic novels tell stories about people in suburban Midwestern neighborhoods, poignantly reflecting on the role memory plays in constructing identity. Stories featuring many of Ware’s protagonists—Quimby the Mouse, Rusty Brown, and Jimmy Corrigan—often first appear in serialized form, in publications such as The New York Times, the Guardian, or Ware’s own ongoing comic book series Acme Novelty Library, before being organized into their own stand-alone books.

Daniel Clowes, born in Chicago in 1961, is an internationally celebrated comic book artist and graphic novelist. To date, he has published nearly 50 comic books and graphic novels including Ghost World, Art School Confidential, Lloyd Llewellyn, David Boring, Ice Haven, The Death-Ray, Wilson, Mister Wonderful, and in 1989, the groundbreaking comic book series Eightball. Clowes gained wide recognition in 2001 with the release of Ghost World, the Terry Zwigoff-directed, Academy Award-nominated film for which he wrote the screenplay. Clowes is also a highly acclaimed magazine illustrator with work appearing in Time, Newsweek, GQ, and many other magazines. Beginning in 2007, Clowes became a regular cover artist for The New Yorker and created the twenty-episode series Mister Wonderful for the New York Times Magazine.

Anton van Dalen was born in Amstelveen, Holland and lives in New York City. He is represented by P·P·O·W Gallery in New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, and the New York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at: Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally, and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New York Historical Society. For close to thirty years, Van Dalen worked with Saul Steinberg as his studio assistant.

Hillary Chute, a renowned expert on graphic narratives and comics, holds joint appointments in Northeastern University’s Department of English and Department of Art and Design. Chute is the author of Disaster Drawn (Harvard University Press, 2016), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (The University of Chicago Press, 2014), Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), and Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011).

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Tags: Anton van Dalen, Chicago, Chris Ware, Chris Ware Daniel Clowes and Anton van Dalen on Saul Steinberg, Daniel Clowes, Fullerton Hall, Hillary Chute, Loop, Saul Steinberg, The Art Institute of Chicago