Includes free museum admission after 3:30pm.
Booksigning with the artist; books available in the Museum Store
History is personal in this conversation with award-winning artist Nora Krug. From unique, wide-ranging sources of inspiration and in-depth research, Krug’s provocative visual storytelling invites us to understand and reconcile the past in service of a brighter future.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
“How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?”
—Nora Krug
Nora Krug is a German American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and A Public Space, and in anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon and Schuster, and Chronicle Books, among others.
Born in 1977 in Karslruhe, Germany, Krug attended a specialized middle and high school for classical music but chose to pursue a career in art, studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Berlin University of the Arts, and School of Visual Arts, where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree. While studying in New York, Krug said she felt discomfort when discussing her home country because “as soon as you answer someone who asks you where you are from, the association with the Nazi period is there. You are constantly being confronted with it.” While encountering negative stereotypes about German cultural identity she simultaneously delved deeply into her family history, of which she had little knowledge. She felt a growing urge to engage with her country’s past in a new way. “I realized that to overcome the collective, abstract shame I had grown into as a German two generations after the war, I needed to go back and ask questions about my family, my hometown,” an exploration that became the impetus for her award-winning visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, The Guardian, National Public Radio, and Kirkus Review, it was also the winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award, Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, Art Directors Club gold cube, Society of Illustrators silver medal, and the British Book Design and Production Award. Krug was named the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and awarded the 2019 Book Illustration Prize Winner by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Krug’s graphic edition of historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century was named a Best Graphic Novel of 2021 by The New York Times and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her visual biography, Kamikaze, was included in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and Best Non-Required Reading, and her animations have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Krug also inspires the next generation of visual communicators a Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York.
A Fulbright Scholar, Krug has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Maurice Sendak Foundation, and she served as a National Advisor to Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms, an international traveling exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum.