The Carle Announces Jules Feiffer Exhibit
(Amherst, MA) August 11, 2011—The Carle is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition featuring cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and children’s book author and illustrator Jules Feiffer. Growing Every Which Way But Up: The Children’s Book Art of Jules Feiffer will open in Amherst, Massachusetts on October 25, 2011 and remain on view until January 22, 2012.
As an artist and writer of probing wit and uncommon humanity, Jules Feiffer has made a breathtakingly varied contribution to America’s cultural life for over 50 years. From his Village Voice editorial cartoons to his plays and screenplays including Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, Feiffer’s satirical outlook has helped define us politically, sexually, and socially. He has excelled in journalism, film, and off Broadway. This exhibition will focus on his equally prodigious talents as an author and illustrator of children’s books.
From illustrations that he did to complement Norton Juster’s 1961 uproarious classic, The Phantom Tollbooth, to his current picture-book collaborations with his daughter Kate, Feiffer’s artwork for children is all the more expressive for the years of fatherhood, cartoon-drawing, teaching, and storytelling that informs it. Leonard S. Marcus, the children’s book historian and critic and author of the upcoming The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, is guest curator for the show. “Feiffer finds that picture-book artists and cartoonists live by many of the same imperatives: the need to instantly grab the reader’s attention, the need to simplify without oversimplifying, and the need to keep the action moving,” Marcus said. Marcus, who wrote an article about the exhibition for the fall edition of Fine Books & Collections Magazine, says “Tracing the arc of Feiffer’s latest creative adventure has for me, as the Carle exhibition’s curator, been an exciting chance not only to share with museum-goers some of contemporary children’s literature’s most keenly irreverent graphics, but also to show that ‘kids’ book illustration’ can be just as poignant—and pert—as the many and varied other forms of narrative art that Feiffer has practiced so brilliantly over the years.”
Feiffer’s far-ranging credits include a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and an Obie for his plays. The animated version of Munro, which he scripted, won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
