Maira Kalman At The Jewish Museum
This summer, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (map) presents Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World), the first major museum survey of the work of award-winning illustrator, author and designer Maira Kalman.
Well-known for her covers and drawings for The New Yorker, Kalman has also written and illustrated over a dozen books for children and adults, authored two celebrated illustrated blogs for The New York Times, and has collaborated with the likes of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and choreographer Mark Morris. Kalman’s art appears everywhere in the foreground of today’s visual culture illuminating contemporary life with joy and humor, intelligence and insights, curlicues and question marks.
The exhibition, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, features a selection of 100 original works on paper that span thirty years of illustration for publication as well as less widely seen works in photography, embroidery, textiles, and performance.
Kalman, born in Tel Aviv in 1949, immigrated to the United States at the age of four with her family. She has lived in New York ever since.
The 100 works on view — from preliminary sketches to paintings — are quickly paced and hung as a running narrative of personal memories, cultural references, life’s abundant pleasures and distractions, and the chaos of profound events — all rendered in Kalman’s now signature blend of written text and drawings and infused with her keen sense of the absurd. “I think everything I do is narrative. It’s things that are from my life, and things I’ve seen, and things I’ve seen in books. It’s always telling stories,” she says.
Nothing is lost on Kalman for whom the everyday charm of a nicely wrapped package or an interesting fez holds as much interest as the state of democracy in America today. “As an artist, I’m reporting the big things and the small things. And sometimes you don’t know which is which.”
Kalman’s art is a discipline of daily creativity and observation, and she speaks of her work as a form of journalism. Taking photographs, collecting objects and arranging them, writing in notebooks, drawing in journals, painting pictures, making lists – these are the tools she uses to render an ongoing account of the world as she sees it. “Being curious is a completely natural part of it, and being a busybody, and wanting to know what people are doing, and why, and how it works. And why are you wearing those shoes? And what’s that hole puncher for? The nature of curiosity is both about how people live their lives and about the bigger picture of how the world works,” says Kalman.
Expressive of her habits as a collector of odds and ends, traveler, reader, and avid walker, Kalman has created a special installation as a context for the survey furnished with chairs, ladders and “many tables of many things”– balls of string, things that have fallen out of books, moss, lists, bobby pins. The installation invites viewers to observe her way of structuring the world in and outside of the studio.
Photo courtesy of Contemporary Jewish Museum
