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This Tuesday: Chris Ware and Lorin Stein at BAM

By

Bulletin

chriswareevent

Tomorrow evening (Tuesday, April 21), join us in Brooklyn at the BAMcafé, where our editor, Lorin Stein, will talk to Chris Ware as part of BAM’s Eat, Drink, and Be Literary series.

Zadie Smith has said, “There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware.” His latest book, Building Stories (2012), pushes the boundaries of the comic format—it’s a series of books, broadsheets, scraps, and pamphlets focusing on the inhabitants of a single building in Chicago. The Paris Review’s interview with Ware ran in our Fall 2014 issue, for which he also designed the cover. “The quote marks that fine art put around picture making in the mid to late twentieth century just seemed a dead end to me,” he says, speaking of what led him to pursue comics:

Sarcasm can only go so far. I just figured there must still be various ways to make art “about” something without making it bad or sentimental. Comics basically seemed a way ­toward this goal for me, especially since they are a language meant to be read, not seen—which is a frighteningly interesting and very human way of perceiving the world, and one that’s generally given short shrift, especially in art schools.

Tickets for tomorrow’s event are available here. Lorin will also moderate BAM events with Jane Smiley, on June 2, and Rachel Kushner, on June 10.