Cartoon America opening video on web

The Library of Congress has put some video of the November opening speeches. The video is poor, but just listen to the sound which is fine.

TITLE: Library of Congress Opens "Cartoon America" Exhibition
SPEAKER: Harry Katz, Jules Feiffer, Brian Walker, Ann Telnaes, Kevin Kallaugher, Art Wood
EVENT DATE: 11/01/2006
RUNNING TIME: 46 minutes


DESCRIPTION:

A host of well-known cartoonists and publishers were on hand at the Library of Congress to celebrate the opening of "Cartoon America: Highlights from the Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature," a exhibition featuring 100 masterworks of the nation's most renown cartoonists. It was also the occasion for the launching of a companion book titled "Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress" which is published by Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Library of Congress. The book is edited by Harry Katz, former head curator of the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Images of many cartoon drawings in the exhibition are included among the 275 full-color illustrations in the book, which also surveys the Library's other holdings of related art.

Speaker Biography: Harry Katz is former head curator of the Library's Prints and Photographs Division.

Speaker Biography: Jules Feiffer is an American syndicated comic-strip cartoonist and author. In 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice, and in 2004 was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. Feiffer's cartoons ran for 42 years in the The Village Voice and have been collected into 19 books. They have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and The Nation. He was commissioned in 1997 by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip which ran monthly until 2000. Feiffer has most recently written several award-winning children's books including "The Man in the Ceiling" and "A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears." Feiffer is an adjunct professor at Southampton College. Previously he taught at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. He has been a senior fellow at the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program. Feiffer is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the National Cartoonist Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and the Creativity Foundation's 2006 Laureate.

Speaker Biography: Brian Walker is a professional cartoonist, a cartoon scholar and a founder and former director of the Museum of Cartoon Art (now the International Museum of Cartoon Art), where he worked from 1974 to 1992. In addition, he has contributed gags for the comic strips "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois" since 1984. Walker has written and edited more than a dozen books on cartoon art, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and magazine articles. He has curated 65 cartoon exhibitions, including the retrospectives "The Sunday Funnies: 100 Years of Comics in American Life" at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Conn. and "100 Years of American Comics" at the Belgian Center for Comic Art in Brussels.

Speaker Biography: Born in Sweden, Ann Telnaes' editorial cartoons are syndicated with Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate/ New York Times Syndicate. Her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Le Monde, Courrier International, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The New York Times, Austin American Statesman,The American Prospect and Ms magazine. Telnaes also contributes an exclusive weekly cartoon to Women's eNews, an online news service. Telnaes' work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in 2004. Her first book, "Humor's Edge," was published by Pomegranate Press and the Library of Congress in 2004. Her work has also been exhibited in Paris and Jerusalem.

Speaker Biography: Kevin Kallaugher is the editorial cartoonist for The Baltimore Sun and The Economist magazine of London. In March 1978, The Economist recruited him to become its first resident cartoonist in its 145-year history. Kevin spent the next ten years working in London as a cartoonist for such publications as The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, Today and The Mail on Sunday. Kallaugher returned to the U.S. in 1988 to join The Sun as its editorial cartoonist. His work for The Sun and The Economist has appeared in more than 100 papers worldwide. His cartoons are distributed worldwide by Cartoonist and Writer's Syndicate. He has won many awards for his work, including the 1999 Thomas Nast Award presented by the Overseas Press Club of America and the 1996 Grafica Internazionale Award at the International Festival of Satire in Pisa, Italy. He has published one collection of his Economist drawings titled "Drawn from the Economist" in 1988 and three collections of his Baltimore Sun cartoons: "KALtoons" (1992), "KAL Draws a Crowd" (1997) and "KAL Draws the Line (2000)." Kallaugher is past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and has had his work on display in the Tate Gallery in London and The Library of Congress. He has had one man exhibitions in London, New York, Washington and Baltimore.

Speaker Biography: A resident of Washington, D.C., Art Wood collected the works of his leading American and European colleagues throughout his long career. His collection also includes works that he purchased, particularly in the areas of animation art and illustrators' drawings. The purchased portion of the collection under the agreement with the Library includes only those items that he bought to expand the collection. During his professional life, Wood worked diligently to establish a museum or gallery to preserve and showcase his collection. He achieved his goal in 1995 with the opening of the National Gallery of Caricature and Cartoon Art in downtown Washington, D.C., but the gallery closed in 1997 due to a lack of sustained funding. Undeterred, Wood turned to the Library of Congress, where he had worked early in his career, to preserve and present his collection.