Past Event: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary with Roz Chast & Neil Goldberg

Cartoonist Roz Chast and visual and performance artist Neil Goldberg reflect on finding humor, absurdity, and beauty in everyday moments – particularly through the eyes of New Yorkers. Brooklyn-born Chast has chronicled the anxieties, pleasures, and perils of contemporary city life as an author and longtime staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Goldberg’s work also captures residents of the city amidst everyday moments – from ordering lunch at the deli to running for a train. His most recent project, Other People’s Prescriptions, a photographic study of New Yorkers looking through corrective lens, considers some of the myriad various perspectives that characterize urban life. After each giving a short presentation, Chast and Goldberg will sit down with author and former NPR host and correspondent Jacki Lyden to discuss their work.  

About the Speakers:

Roz Chast is an acclaimed cartoonist who has published hundreds of pieces in The New Yorker for almost four decades. Author of the award-winning, best-selling memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury, 2014), Chast was the subject of the Museum of the City of New York's 2016 exhibition, Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs. She has written and illustrated many children’s books, including a collaboration with Steve Martin on the children’s book The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!, contributed to numerous humor collections, and lectured widely.   

Neil Goldberg makes visual art and performance work that focuses on embodiment, sensing, mortality, and the everyday. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Jewish Museum, and has been presented at art institutions throughout North America and Europe. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches at the Yale School of Art. The New York Times described his work as “tender, moving and sad but also deeply funny" and Time Out New York wrote, “Goldberg has produced some of the most quietly intense and affecting art of his generation.”

Jacki Lyden (moderator) was an award-winning host and foreign correspondent for NPR for over 30 years, and still contributes to NPR.  Her bestselling memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, was hailed as a classic by The New York Times, adapted for film, and translated into nine languages.  She has spoken widely on the subject of family mental illness.  She's currently at work on her next memoir, Tell Me Something Good, which follows her transformation as a storyteller.  She lives in Brooklyn and Silver Spring, MD.