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The Adam Baumgold Gallery is showing the iconic artist’s work — the entire exhibit is in the link, and it will probably make you cry.

……….Adam Baumgold Gallery presents original drawings by Chris Ware from his new periodical The ACME Novelty Library 20, to premiere at the gallery from September 16 through October 23, 2010. The exhibition will feature the complete drawings for The ACME Novelty Library 20 (serialized in Zadie Smith’s “The Book of Other People” and The Virginia Quarterly Review) which is also a contributing chapter to one of his ongoing graphic novels, “Rusty Brown.” In addition, the exhibition will include a handful of drawings from proposed ill-fated (and sated) television projects, “The ACME Novelty Network,” and “Quimby the Mouse,” a short executed with animator John Kuramoto for “This American Life.”

This installment of the “ACME Novelty Library” chronicles the life of Jordan Wellington Lint (b.1958) from cradle to grave, each year of Lint’s life represented by a few representative seconds of consciousness per page. As he grows from child to sullen teen to angry young man to repressed upstanding citizen – and moves towards his inevitable end – Lint adapts to his own social advantages, personal mistakes and the lies he tells himself to somehow end up feeling pretty okay about things. Ware approximates Lint’s inner life at every stage through a muddled stream of overlaid thoughts, personal symbols and mislaid memories, providing insight into the mind of a bemused father, ineffectual businessman and aspiring rock musician.

Chris Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1967. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and also attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of “Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth” (Pantheon Books, 2000) which received the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 and the American Book Award in 2000. He is author of the irregular periodical “The Acme Novelty Library” (Volumes 1 – 20), “Quimby the Mouse,” as well as the sketchbook collections “The ACME Novelty Datebook, Volumes 1 and 2.” He was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize an ongoing graphic novel (“Building Stories”) in The New York Times magazine in 2005-2006, and he edited the anthologies McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 2004 and “The Best American Comics” in 2007. He has been the recipient of numerous Eisner and Harvey Comic book awards between 1994 and 2009, received the obscure French “L’Alph Art” award in 2003, and was the recipient of a United States Artists “Hoi” Fellowship in 2007. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

Chris Ware’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2002, as well as in the traveling exhibition Masters of American Comics in 2005-2006 that opened at MOCA and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He has had retrospective exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2006, in 2007 at the Sheldon Memorial Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska and at the Gävle Konstcentrum in Sweden in 2010. Chris Ware lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois.

1 COMMENT

  1. About the “obscure” alph art given to
    Chris Ware
    An Alph Art in Europe is very prestigious.
    It’s an award given at the Angoulême
    International Comics Festival, the most
    important comics festival in Europe
    (more than 200,000 attendees in 2010). Today the term Alph Art is not used anymore and has been replaced by the word award.

  2. About the “obscure” alph art given to
    Chris Ware
    An Alph Art in Europe is very prestigious.
    It’s an award given at the Angoulême
    International Comics Festival, the most
    important comics festival in Europe
    (more than 200,000 attendees in 2010).
    Today the term Alph Art is not used
    anymore and has been replaced by the word
    award.