Acclaimed American cartoonist and graphic novelist Ben Katchor will present “The Great Museum Cafeterias of the Western World: An Illustrated Lecture on the Design and Culture of Museum Cafeterias” at Carleton College on Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. Following his lecture, Katchor will answer questions and sign copies of his books, which will be available for purchase at the event. Katchor’s appearance is free and open to the public and will be held in the College’s Boliou Hall Auditorium.
Living and teaching in New York City, Katchor is able to regularly visit some of North America's greatest museums—and their cafeterias. In this illustrated lecture on the design and culture of museum cafeterias, he will examine the work of philosopher Claude Curculio, whose theory of the "veracious peek" was the first to explain the mysterious connection between art and museum cafeterias. Katchor's slide presentation will offer an anecdotal survey of the design and culture of the world's great museum cafeterias, both past and present.
Katchor’s picture-stories and drawings have appeared in numerous publications, including The Forward, Metropolis Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. His serialized strips include “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer,” “The Jew of New York,” “The Cardboard Valise,” “Hotel & Farm,” and, most recently, “Shoehorn Technique.” His comics have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese. Four collections of his strips have been published: Cheap Novelties, The Pleasures of Urban Decay (Penguin (Non-classics), 1991); Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (Little, Brown & Company, 1996), The Jew of New York (Pantheon, 2000); and The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon, 2000). In February 2011, Pantheon will also publish The Cardboard Valise.
In 1993 Katchor was the subject of a lengthy profile by Lawrence Weschler in The New Yorker. He won an Obie Award for Best New American Work for his collaboration with Bang on a Can on The Carbon Copy Building, a "comic book opera" based on his writings and drawings that premiered in 1999. The same year, he was the subject of Pleasures of Urban Decay, a documentary by the San Francisco filmmaker Samuel Ball.
More recently, Katchor has collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on The Rosenbach Company, a sung-through musical biography of Abe Rosenbach, the pre-eminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century; The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, an absurdist romance about the chemical emissions and addictive soft-drinks of a ruined tropical factory-island, which won an Obie Award for Best New Production in 2008; and A Checkroom Romance, a love story about the culture and architecture of the coat-check room.
The first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2000), Katchor is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1995). In 2002, he was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in Visual Arts at The American Academy in Berlin and in 2007 he was a fellow at The Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. He is an associate professor of illustration at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City. For more information, visit www.katchor.com.
Katchor’s appearance is made possible by the Christopher U. Light Lecture Series at Carleton College. Boliou Hall is accessible from Highway 19 on the Carleton campus. For more information, including disability accommodations, contact Carleton’s art and art history department at (507) 222-4341. Copies of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (Little, Brown & Company, 1996), The Jew of New York (Pantheon, 2000); and The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon, 2000) will be available for purchase at the event and one week prior to Katchor’s appearance at a 15% discount at the Carleton College Bookstore. For more information, call (507) 222-4153.
