Ware, hailed as a master of the comic form, is known for his numerous New Yorker magazine covers, the ACME Novelty Library series he began in 1994, and graphic novels such as Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth(2000), Building Stories (2012), and Monograph (2017). His work often features innovative compositions, intricate details, vivid colors, and explorations of memory and loneliness. He has garnered numerous awards, including multiple Eisners and Harveys for achievement in comic books.
His books have also been named best of the year by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. The New York Times said: “Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything.” Ware is also the first comics artist to have work exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibition in 2002. Other exhibitions have been at the Jewish Museum in New York City, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ware’s appearance at the Tang Teaching Museum is by invitation from E.B. Sciales ’19, an English major with minors in studio art and art history. She holds the prestigious 2018-19 Eleanor Linder Winter ’43 Internship, a one-year pre-professional program in museum work for Skidmore students. In this role, Sciales is charged with the research, planning and coordination of the annual Winter/Miller Lecture.
The Winter/Miller Lecture is made possible through a generous gift by the family of Eleanor Linder Winter ’43. The inaugural Winter/Miller lecture was delivered in March 2018 by the artist Nicole Eisenman.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Chris Ware
Ware (b. 1967, Omaha, Nebraska) earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he published a regular comic strip in the student newspaper that Art Spiegelman happened upon and subsequently gave the youthful cartoonist four pages in his and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine. Ware moved to Chicago in the early 1990s to study printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began publishing in the pages of the Chicago alternative weeklies New City and The Chicago Reader, forming the bulk of material which he’s collected in the semi-regular periodical The ACME Novelty Library ever since. Offering both serialized stories and short experiments in comics form, a collection of the same name was issued in a large-format hardcover by Pantheon Books in 2005.
A regular contributor of comic strips and over two dozen covers to The New Yorker, Ware garnered international acclaim for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), which received an American Book Award in 2000, the Guardian First Book Award in 2001. In 2009 Jimmy Corrigan was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times of London. His book, Building Stories, was a New York Times and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year for 2012, and was chosen as the single best book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly. His work was the focus of the PBS program Art in the 21st Century in 2016. His eponymous monograph was released by Rizzoli in 2017 and Rusty Brown Part I is forthcoming. Ware lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife, Marnie, a high school science teacher, and their daughter, Clara.
https://tang.skidmore.edu/calendar/912-winter-miller-lecture-chris-ware
Image: Chris Ware photograph by Seth Kushner