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Art Spiegelman: An Interview

Video Data Bank

1990 00:29:00 United StatesEnglishColor4:3Video
Tags:
History, Interview, Jewish, Politics, Visual Art, War, VDB Interviews

Description

Art Spiegelman was born and raised in New York, and began working as a cartoonist while still in High School. He attended the State University of New York in Binghamton, where he studied Philosophy. Spiegelman, who continued to work as a cartoonist, mainly in underground publications, throughout his schooling, has long been acknowledged as one of our era's foremost comic book artists. However, it was Maus, published in two volumes in 1986, that first brought his work to a mass audience. Maus tells the stories of a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany and his son. Portraying the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, the cartoon approaches the "unspeakable through diminutive." Maus won a Pulitzer Prize—the first, and only, graphic novel to do so. Spiegelman is co-founder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1990.

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.