Françoise Mouly has been art director of The New Yorker – and responsible for its distinctive cover art – for the past 19 years.
She’ll take us behind the scenes at the magazine and reveal how those signature covers, commenting on the most urgent political and cultural events of the day, are created.
Find out how artists like R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman respond to her calls for submissions, fish for ideas … and then brace themselves for rejection. Peek at some of the shocking and hilarious sketches that didn’t make the cut. And see how contemporary history – from the farce of Monica Lewinsky to nuclear meltdown in Japan – is captured in images as acute as they are outrageous.
This is a privileged tour behind (and between) the covers of a journalistic icon, guided by one of its most celebrated veterans.
Featuring
Françoise Mouly
Françoise Mouly is a publisher, designer, and art editor of the New Yorker. She is also the founder of Raw Books and Graphics and a co-founder of the avant-garde comics anthology RAW.
Born in Paris, Mouly studied architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts before moving to New York in 1974.
Mouly spent 15 years at Raw Books and Graphics, where she published artists' monographs as well as the annual Streets of Soho and Tribeca Map and Guide.
In 1980, she and her husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, launched the revolutionary comics anthology, RAW, which brought acclaim to various pioneering comic artists.
She is responsible for around 950 covers in her 19 years at the New Yorker. Her book, Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution, compiles over 300 of these works.
She was named Chevalier in the order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2001.
In 2006, and again in 2007, her works were awarded ‘Best Cover of the Year’ by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
In 2011, she was awarded France’s highest honour: the Ordre National de la Légion D'Honneur (Legion of Honour).