“Surviving Maus: Visualizing the Unimaginable” with Art Spiegelman

Presented in collaboration with the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, OpenVisions, Fairfield University Art Museum, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Fairfield County

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves with Maus, Maus II, and In the Shadow of No Towers, 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.”

Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning, masterful Holocaust narrative, Maus, 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.

Presented in conjunction with the Fairfield University Art Museum’s exhibition, In Real Times: Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights, Spiegelman will discuss his own work while offering reflections on Szyk’s anti-Nazi political cartooning.