Now showing at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum:
Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)

“I was out walking the dear dog and I saw 500 things that made me want to make art.”
- Maira Kalman

The first major museum retrospective of award-winning illustrator, author and designer Maira Kalman is open now at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum. Perhaps best known for her covers and drawings for The New Yorker, Kalman’s art characteristically shines a joyful, insightful, and often humorous light on contemporary life. The New York-based, Tel Aviv-born artist has written and illustrated over a dozen books for children and adults, authored two celebrated illustrated blogs for The New York Times, and collaborated with the likes of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and choreographer Mark Morris.

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.

The works on view – from preliminary sketches to paintings – are 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,” Kalman says. “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 goes on, “As an artist, I’m reporting the big things and the small things. And sometimes you don’t know which is which.”

Describing the inspiration behind her work – her curious nature and daily observation – Kalman says: “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.”

Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) runs through October 26th.

above: Maira Kalman, Crosstown Boogie Woogie, 1995, gouache on paper, 15 3/8 x 11 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

*above: Maira Kalman, Keep Calm, 2007, gouache on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches. Collection of Barbara Becker and Chad Gallant.

above: Maira Kalman, Woman with Face Net, 2000, gouache on paper, 17 x 14 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

above: Maira Kalman, Man Dances on Salt, 2007, gouache on paper, 9 x 7 3/4 inches. Collection of Tom and Claire O’Connor.

above: Maira Kalman, Self-Portrait (with Pete), 2004–5, gouache on paper, 16 x 15 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

above: portrait of Maira Kalman, courtesy of Rick Meyerowitz.

*Images courtesy of The Contemporary Jewish Museum.