On exhibit through April 15, 2014, Lilli Carré's first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents an entirely new body of work in animation, sculpture, and drawing, highlighting new directions in her creative process. Sculptures are displayed in pairs to show the objects in two separate states of being, while their dimensional forms are abstracted, flattened, and reflected in accompanying drawings. A new work, made specifically for this installation, consists of two videos projected on opposite walls. The dual projection reveals slowly shifting temporal relationships between images, which alternate between abstraction and figuration, and positions the viewer in the empty space between the two animations. The artist encourages viewers to interpret this space and play an active role in filling the gap between objects and their resonant images.  

Find out more about Lilli Carré's exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago!

I so share Helena's view and it reminds me of something I said in a recent interview on Design Mom that I'd like to share again with you here. One of the artists I work with, Frank Cammuso, pointed out that he can’t pull out an iPad at bedtime with his three-year old. An iPad is a window on an endless stream of excitement; it’s not a place to focus and prepare for sleep and dreams. But a book is! A book can be read every night and it will always be the same and different. It will be what your Dad read when he was a kid, and what you’ll read to your children. It has some elements that don’t change yet it’s a new adventure every time you reread it, because reading is truly interactive and the reader is half the story. All day long, I spend my days on a computer, making and manipulating images, reading and writing emails, finding information. A computer is a good tool, a means to an end, but spending so much time online makes me very aware of how special and valuable any ‘old media’ is, anything that is printed, frozen, preserved in one form, fossilized. It’s there to be interpreted. Every time you spend time with it, it remains the same yet it becomes something more. Whenever I hear from people who say that Silly Lilly, Benjamin Bear, A Trip to The Bottom of the World, or any of the TOON Books has become their child’s favorite book, read night after night, I feel hopeful for the future. 

The TOON Team couldn't agree more!  Below some more of our favorite excerpts.  What's yours!?  See below for TOON's Comment Contest.  Click here to read the complete lecture.

ON SUPPORTING LIBRARIES...

"But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information."

"Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open."

"We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future."

"We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different."

Photography credit: Aaron Reiss

Within the graphic arts world, Mouly is venerated. “Françoise has been one of the most influential people in comics for 30 years,” says Peggy Burns, associate publisher at Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, a publishing house inspired by Raw. Mouly is a role model, Burns says: “She’s very generous, very committed to her artists.” Toronto illustrator and author Frank Viva, who is currently finishing his ninthNew Yorker cover, praises Mouly as singularly articulate and knowledgeable: “She knows more about comics, illustration and art than anyone I know.”

Yet beyond that orbit, Mouly is largely unknown, an imbalance soon to be remedied by Jeet Heer’s In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. Heer, a cultural critic and comic aficionado who describes himself as “intra-coastal,” commuting between Toronto and Regina, set out to write about the couple’s creative union before realizing Mouly was the untold story. He believes she’s been overlooked for two reasons: sexism in a traditionally male-dominated field and “wife of” syndrome, with Mouly’s career overshadowed by that of her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, the author of the famed graphic novel Maus.

[...]

Mouly is delighted to finally be a subject, she tells Maclean’s: “I was very well-hidden in plain sight.” Being a woman in the “testosterone-driven” world of cartoons was a mixed blessing, she says: “It was quite lonely, but it also worked for me, because I was an outsider—to the culture, to the language.” Being an “enforced observer of the American political system” has informed her work, she says, noting an early draft of the famed “fist-bump” cover showed Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity peering in a window. Mouly asked they be removed. “It focused blame on them,” she says, “but we were all at that window.” She speaks eloquently about the need for print books and magazines as cultural artifacts—they “fossilize the moment” in a way the web can’t. “They have permanence and authority,” she says; they “hold your fingerprints.” And now, finally, there’s a book that holds hers.

Read the entire article at Maclean's website

For review copies or to schedule interviews, please contact Kimberly Guise at [email protected] or 917.545.9724

“Françoise Mouly, an editor and publisher of uncommon taste and creativity, and an artist in her own right, has spent nearly four decades transforming comics, pushing the art form to become more ambitious,” proclaims the back cover of a new release from Coach House Books. As the art editor of The New Yorker since 1993, Mouly has remade the face of that venerable magazine with covers that capture the political and social upheavals of the last two decades, from the black-on-black cover after 9/11 to the infamous pre-election Barack Obama fist-bump cartoon and the post-DOMA Bert and Ernie cover. And now, with TOON Books, Mouly is at the forefront of a new wave, where making comics for children is at the avant-garde of comics making.

And to complete the September publishing trifecta, on September 16th Mouly will partner withDonorsChoose.org, an online charity that helps public school teachers obtain the supplies needed for their classrooms, to launch the TOON into Comics Genre Study for Reading and Writing for 2nd Grade. This rigorous 6-week curriculum unit is aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) with daily lesson plans that culminate with a publishing party at which students present their self-authored comic books.  For a limited time, the unit will be available to teachers on DonorsChoose.org at half-price through a matching gift from TOON Books. About the new comics curriculum, Mouly proudly declared, “It’s a lifelong dream come true to witness teachers and administrators embrace the comics genre. We always knew that emerging and reluctant readers delight in the pleasure of comics; now it can be channeled to fuel a love of reading and writing. Once kids are on board, there’s a future for comics, and nothing can make me happier.”

No one can possibly accuse Mouly of slowing down when in fact she’s arguably doing more now than ever to advance comics by channeling her passion for this evolving literary art form to the youngest of today’s discerning readers.

 

To schedule an interview with Françoise Mouly and/or Liniers:

Contact Kimberly Guise at [email protected] or 917.545.9724