Please join us for an evening with Chris Ware in Conversation with Chip Kidd, discussing Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a major graphic novel event more than 16 years in progress.

Rusty Brown is a fully interactive, full-color articulation of the time-space interrelationships of three complete consciousnesses in the first half of a single midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit. A sprawling, special snowflake accumulation of the biggest themes and the smallest moments of life, Rusty Brown literately and literally aims at nothing less than the coalescence of one half of all of existence into a single museum-quality picture story, expertly arranged to present the most convincingly ineffable and empathetic illusion of experience for both life-curious readers and traditional fans of standard reality. From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed in the entangled stories of a child who awakens without superpowers, a teen who matures into a paternal despot, a father who stores his emotional regrets on the surface of Mars and a late-middle-aged woman who seeks the love of only one other person on planet Earth.

CHRIS WARE is widely acknowledged to be the most gifted and beloved cartoonist of his generation by both his mother and fourteen-year-old daughter. His Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award and was listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by The Times (London) in 2009. Building Stories was named a Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year in 2012 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. Ware is an irregular contributor to The New Yorker, and his original drawings have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and in piles behind his worktable in Oak Park, Illinois. In 2016 he was featured in the PBS documentary series Art 21: Art in the 21st Century, and in 2017 an eponymous monograph of his work was published by Rizzoli.

CHIP KIDD is an award-winning graphic designer and writer in New York. As an editor and art director for Pantheon Graphic novels, hes worked with and published some of the very best cartoonists in the world, including Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Burns, Michael Cho, and Alex Ross. He is the recipient of the National Design Award for Communications, and his TED Talk has been viewed over 1.6 million times. His first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, was a national bestseller. His most recent book, Go: A Kidds Guide to Graphic Design, is the first book to teach graphic design to children and has over 60,000 copies in print.

Tickets: $40 with a book, $15 without

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Tags: 19th Century Club, Chip Kidd, Chris Ware, Chris Ware in Conversation with Chip Kidd, Oak Park