Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

“Spiegelman’s beautiful, haunting work continues to resonate today.” – Indiewire
“Spiegelman’s biography and his imagination are anything but ordinary.” – Hyperallergic

Co-Presented by The Cartoon Art Museum

Museum associate Gladys A. Ochoa to introduce the Friday, 2/28 show!

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS is a landmark in reckoning with the Holocaust and breakthrough in serious comic art. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC 2024, ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE provides intimate access to the man and mind who revolutionized the art form of comics. See how he grapples with autobiography in his work, his complicated relationship with his Auschwitz-surviving father, as well as his personal struggles upon receiving success and praise for his books about the Holocaust.

MAUS and MAUS II were seminal works about the Jewish experience and the Holocaust, not only in its radical depiction in form, but also in Art’s struggle in how to tell this story through extraordinary honesty, humor and disclosure. Then, in 2022, Spiegelman found himself at the center of the book banning controversy in America, as a Tennessee school board voted to remove MAUS from schools.

DISASTER IS MY MUSE reminds us why Art and his work are crucial to coming to grips with the darkest chapter of history, anti-Semitism, and current attempts to erase the past.

Featuring Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco, Molly Crabapple, J. Hoberman, Ken Jacobs, Najda Spiegelman, Dash Spiegelman, and MORE.

Gladys A. OCHOA
Museum Associate
Gladys Ochoa began working at the Cartoon Art Museum in 2019 as a volunteer. She holds a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts and an MFA from San Francisco State University in Museum Studies. Deciding to use her degrees for good she became a champion for inclusivity in the arts including cartoons. Having been the Prism Awards Chairperson, a co-organizer for the Sick and Disabled Fair (SAD), and an organizer for the Queer Comics Expo, she now focuses on supporting the museum in whatever that entails!