An Evening with Art Spiegelman: The Comic Artist in Conversation
Maus creator Art Spiegelman looks back on an illustrious career — from underground comix to Pulitzer Prize — at the Chicago Humanities Festival's Bridgeport Day.
Why we picked this
Spiegelman's Maus redefined what comics could carry — and his career since has kept pushing at the form's limits. An evening with him is a chance to understand how a medium was transformed by one artist's refusal to treat it lightly.
Art Spiegelman is the creator of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel that depicted the Holocaust through the perspective of a Jewish cartoonist interviewing his father, a survivor — with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book shattered assumptions about what comics could do and opened a conversation about memory, representation, and trauma that has only deepened in the decades since.
Spiegelman has been a provocateur throughout his career, from his early work in underground comix to his New Yorker covers to his essays on censorship and the power of images. This conversation at the Ramova Theatre closes Bridgeport Day with a rare opportunity to hear one of the most consequential artists in American cultural life reflect on the work and the form he helped transform.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Bridgeport Day.