A Serious Talk About Funny Cartoons

This year, the Art Students League celebrates 150 years of artmaking and The New Yorker commemorates 100 years of journalism, fiction, poetry, and cartoons. New Yorker cartoons have frequently been created by artists who studied at the League. Arguably the most famous New Yorker cartoonist of our time, Roz Chast is part of a lineage of specifically women artists who studied at the League and went on to contribute to the New Yorker. In this program Chast will be joined by The New Yorker’s first female cartoon editor, Emma Allen, to discuss their careers, cartoons, and where they see the industry going.

This discussion will be recorded and added to the League's YouTube channel after the event. Subscribe to our channel to be notified when the video is up.

About the Speakers

Roz Chast is a longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker. In 2014, her graphic memoir of her parents' final years, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, was the recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Kirkus prize, the New York Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has published many collections of cartoons and illustrated and written children’s books as well as humor books. Her most recent book is I Must Be Dreaming, a collection of her own illustrated dreams and theories about dreams, published in 2023. When she's not working on cartoons, she is cleaning her birds' cages, fretting, hand embroidering, working on some bats craft project, wasting time online, fretting some more, and drinking coffee. In 2024, she was awarded a medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Biden.

Emma Allen is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker and edits humor on newyorker.com. She has been a member of the magazine’s editorial staff since 2012 and has written numerous articles for the magazine.

About the League

The Art Students League of New York was founded in 1875 by a group of art students who had the revolutionary idea that a fine art education should be accessible to all. In the nearly one hundred and fifty years since, the League has built a legacy as a school where a diverse community of artists are inspired to produce work that reflects their full potential. Hundreds of history-making artists studied or taught at the League, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Hans Hoffman, Charles White, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Al Hirschfeld, Barnett Newman, Norman Lewis, David Smith, Mavis Pusey, Roy Lichtenstein, Romare Bearden, James Rosenquist, Adrian Piper, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, Pacita Abad, Lee Bontecou, Ai Weiwei, and more.

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