NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of the City of New York presents Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs, an hilarious and touching exploration of the life and work of the author, artist, and New Yorker cartoonist who has consistently been one of the most distinctive and complex comedic voices in America over the last four decades. The exhibition opened to the public on Thursday, April 14.
Born in the working- and lower-middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Kensington/Parkview—“deep Brooklyn”—Chast was the only child of two first-generation New Yorkers, both educators who subscribed to The New Yorker and inspired her art and worldview. Since the late 1970s, she has chronicled the follies of contemporary urban (and suburban) life in a body of work that includes over 1,200 cartoons published in The New Yorker and other magazines, as well as children’s books, many collaborations with other authors, and her award-winning 2014 visual memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? The New Yorker’s first major contemporary female cartoonist, Chast is known and adored for bringing a fresh and subversive sensibility to the cartoon art form.
“Seeing Chast’s lifetime of brilliant work on the walls of our Museum will be an absolute pleasure for New Yorkers and visitors alike,” said Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “Those of us lucky enough to call New York City home will see ourselves – and our friends and our neighbors and our relatives – in her cartoons, and museumgoers who come from greater distances will get to explore, confirm, and challenge many of their pre-suppositions about New York City and its inhabitants with laughter as a guide. Our hope is that Roz’s quintessentially New York sense of humor will help everyone digest and appreciate the silliness and oddities that make the five boroughs so special.”
Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs displays over 200 works – many of which have never been published, including a mural Chast calls “Subway Sofa”, which she painted at the Museum while visitors looked on – showcasing the artist’s keen eye for the absurdities of daily life in New York City and beyond. Featuring Chast’s diverse roster of characters whose eccentricities are all too familiar – the besieged moms and dads, hostile adolescents, weird neighbors, local eccentrics, and stressed-out city dwellers plagued by anxiety and self-doubt – the exhibition offers a wry look at city life that is at once dark and sympathetic, playing on stresses to evoke smiles.
Though known for making people smile, Chast’s work also offers a depth inherent in its subject matter. In her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, she examines issues as poignant and daunting as old age, sickness, and death in a grimly funny look at end-of-life struggles as the artist experienced them with her elderly parents. By infusing comedy into matters all too severe, Chast – and Cartoon Memoirs – invites viewers to ponder universal fears in way that is at once emotional and clear-eyed, challenging but comforting.
“To get to know Roz’s oeuvre is to truly explore what it means to be a New Yorker and honestly examine how that personality works or doesn’t work inside and outside of the five boroughs,” explained Frances Rosenfeld, Curator of Cartoon Memoirs. “Roz Chast doesn’t shy away from the emotions and experiences that make us uncomfortable; rather, her ability to embrace the awkward and eccentric parts of New York City and life in general allows her to achieve a rare blend of insightful and amusing.”
The exhibition is organized into five sections that showcase the scope of Chast’s prolific career and explore the settings and environments that have inspired and shaped her uniquely acerbic worldview.
• In The New Yorker
• World of Roz Chast
• When You Live In New York
• You Are Now Leaving New York
• Cartoon Memoirs
