The November 10 cover of the New Yorker features a drawing by renowned cartoonist and Oak Park resident Chris Ware. It’s an illustration of a health clinic at a Walmart-style big-box store: a clinician walks out of a door into the waiting area looking down at a clipboard he’s holding; seated are mothers with children on their laps. Aside from superb color choice and hyperprecise lines, what stands out are the gestures: the children all reach out for one another while their mothers, looking askance, pull them away.
Despite being centered around only a half-dozen displays, the exhibit’s reference points are abundant. Aside from Sullivan, Ware riffs on the World’s Columbian Exposition and the work of Daniel Burnham, Françoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Yoshida, the Chicago Imagists—a constellation of Chicago and comic-artist influences. Still, the experience of seeing “The Comic Art and Architecture” didn’t really remind me of reading comics or looking at art or architecture. Rather, it brought to mind a movie: Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, the rotoscoped 2001 film in which drawings on top of each frame give the work an extrasensory dimension.
Through 1/19/15 Art Institute of Chicago 111 S. Michigan 312-443-3600artinstituteofchicago.org
