Award-winning illustrator and cartoonist Art Spiegelman to share his imagination during Sept. 21 Syracuse Symposium presentation

Award-winning illustrator and cartoonist Art Spiegelman to share his imagination during Sept. 21 Syracuse Symposium presentationSeptember 08, 2006Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Art Spiegelman will share his perspective on the imaginative world of cartooning and illustration Sept. 21 as part of the 2006 Syracuse Symposium.

Spiegelman’s performance, “COMIX 101.1,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Shemin Auditorium in the Shaffer Art Building and is free and open to the public. Co-sponsors are U.Encounter, Kaleidoscope, The Soling Program and the Winnick Hillel Center. Paid parking for the public is available in the Marion lot and Irving Garage.

The performance will lean toward his work “In the Shadow of No Towers” (Knopf, 2004), a deeply personal and politically charged account of the tragic events and aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

The symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival hosted by The College of Arts and Sciences that celebrates interdisciplinary thinking, imagination and creation. This year’s theme is “Imagination.” For more information on symposium events, visit http://symposium.syr.edu.

Spiegelman is credited with helping to bring comic books into the literary realm. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his Holocaust narrative “Maus,” which portrayed Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. His second narrative, “Maus II,” told of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America.

Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 16. He studied art and philosophy at Harpur College before becoming part of the underground comics movement. He was creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co. from 1965-87 and designed Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, among other novelty items. He and his wife, Francoise Mauly, co-founded the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine RAW in 1980.

His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. A major exhibition of his work was shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in November 2005.