VIRTUAL PROGRAM
Very Funny Ladies: Cartoonists of The New Yorker
Join New Yorker cartoonists Liza Donnelly, Roz Chast, Victoria Roberts, Emily Sanders Hopkins, and Sara Lautman as they discuss their work and what it is like to be a woman in a field historically dominated by men.
About the panelists:
When Liza Donnelly was in college, the second wave of feminism was in full swing, and though she championed equal rights for women from the start, “I didn’t think I was a feminist cartoonist—I just wanted to be a cartoonist.” But while working at The New Yorker, she realized that there were very few women drawing cartoons, and that female artists could offer unique and meaningful perspectives. Tina Brown, editor of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, especially appreciated Donnelly’s work and published “a lot of it.” This helped to foster Donnelly’s humorous voice as a woman and inspired her to view cartooning as a means of bringing sexism and other feminist concerns to light. The subject of equality and women’s rights at work, at home, in society, and around the globe remains a significant theme in her work today. Her passion for women’s rights led her to write Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonists and Their Cartoons (2005), a history of women cartoonists, and Sex and Sensibility (2008) a collection of writing and cartoons by women. Her new book Very Funny Ladies will be published in 2021.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Roz Chast is the only child of two educators who subscribed to The New Yorker and inspired her art and world view – her strong-willed mother, Elizabeth, and her gentle, worrywart father, George, who were in the same fifth grade class. Chast studied painting and printmaking at Kirkland College in upstate New York, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, but did not feel free to explore car- tooning fully until after graduation. Her earliest drawings were published in Christopher Street,The Village Voice, and later, National Lampoon.
In 1978, The New Yorker accepted her first submission, a small collection of “Little Things” that stood apart from the cartoons generally associated with the magazine. As a young artist, she gathered a collection of original drawings, “put them in a portfolio, and dropped it off with my little card. I came back to pick them up the next week and there was a note from the cartoon editor [Lee Lorenz], which completely floored me. He said to start coming back every week, so I did.” Since then, more than eight hundred of Chast’s artworks have been published by The New Yorker. Though she covers all manner of subjects in her art, she particularly enjoys drawing interior scenes, replete with elaborate wallpapers and furnishings – a conspiracy of inanimate objects” reminiscent of her early life. Chast’s cartoons have also appeared in Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones, among others.
Victoria Roberts is a cartoonist and performer. A staff cartoonist for The New Yorker since 1988,Roberts’ work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and many other magazines and newspapers. She illustrates the Q&A weekly science question in The New York Times. She was called Australia’s most successful female cartoonist by The Age. She is the author of After the Fall, published by W. W. Norton and Company in November 2012.
Her style has been described as whimsical, and according to The Sydney Morning Herald, “there is delight, and childish embellishments”.In her own words, she likes “to draw fat little ladies with hearing aids, weird infants with glasses, and domestic scenes; I see things as people at home see them”.
Roberts has also worked in animation. Credits include “Goodbye Sally Goldstein” and “The Maitland and Morpeth Quartet”, and also in radio, recording “Divinity Fudge” for WNYC, and “The Life of Truman Capote” for ABC Radio Australia.
Since 2004, she has appeared on stage as her earliest cartoon character Nona Appleby. Nona is a kimono-clad Australian octogenarian. Her first solo show, Nona, opened at the National Museum for Women in Washington D.C. in 2005, and went on to a season at Urban Stages in New York City
Emily Sanders Hopkins, author of the weekly advice column Emily Writes Back at EmilyWritesBack.com, is a book ghostwriter, magazine editor, and cartoonist and illustrator. She published her first New Yorker cartoon when she worked at the magazine as a fact checker in the early 2000s, and she may be the first Black woman to have a cartoon appear in the magazine. When she married New Yorker cartoonist Marshall Hopkins, they became the third married New Yorker cartoonist couple in the magazine’s history (Mary Petty and Alan Dunn were the first, Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin were the second).
Emily’s essay “Exotic” is featured in the New York Times notable book Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women, edited by Lizzie Skurnick. Most recently, she has created a large collection of commissioned family portraits done in a cartoon-like style, and she is at work on a novel about Donald Trump.
Sara Lautman is a cartoonist and illustrator. She is the author of the collections I Love You (Retrofit, 2018), The Ultimate Laugh (Tinto Press, 2014), and a graphic novel, Jason, to be published by Diskette Press in 2021. She teaches comics at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she lives with her partner, friends and a team of cats. She has been contributing to the New Yorker since 2015. You can find Sara online at www.saralautman.com , Instagram: @slautow, and Twitter: @saralautman
This series is generously sponsored by
Tuesday Night Talks: Finding Funny in Complicated Times
We guarantee we can make you laugh once a week. Join a roster of funny men and women every Tuesday evening for a rollicking virtual event. We’ll hear from today’s foremost cartoonists. They’ll share their work, some secrets to their success, views on the role of cartoons in advancing important ideas, and we think there might be jokes.
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