We went, last night, to a preview of Maira Kalman's exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. We went as grandparents  whose grandchildren have discovered a number of the 12 books she wrote for them ... for her ... for us. We can't recall books that we've so enjoyed reading out loud, and perhaps 'loud' is the operative word. The characters become more alive when we stress the words, the outrageous but oh-so-real words. And, we bought The New Yorker cover, New Yorkistan, made into a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle illustrated by Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz.

Here is a more learned and 'artful' approach to the exhibit, by the museum itself:

Well-known for her covers and drawings for The New Yorker, Kalman has also written and illustrated over a dozen books for children and adults, authored two celebrated illustrated blogs for The New York Times, and has collaborated with the likes of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and choreographer Mark Morris. Kalman’s art appears everywhere in the foreground of today’s visual culture illuminating contemporary life with joy and humor, intelligence and insights, curlicues and question marks.

The exhibition, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, features a selection of 100 original works on paper that span thirty years of illustration for publication as well as less widely seen works in photography, embroidery, textiles, and performance.

Kalman, born in Tel Aviv in 1949, immigrated to the United States at the age of four with her family. She has lived in New York ever since.

Overview
The 100 works on view — from preliminary sketches to paintings — are quickly paced and hung as a running narrative of personal memories, cultural references, life’s abundant pleasures and distractions, and the chaos of profound events — all rendered in Kalman’s now signature blend of written text and drawings and infused with her keen sense of the absurd. “I think everything I do is narrative.  It’s things that are from my life, and things I’ve seen, and things I’ve seen in books. It’s always telling stories,” she says.

Nothing is lost on Kalman for whom the everyday charm of a nicely wrapped package or an interesting fez holds as much interest as the state of democracy in America today. “As an artist, I’m reporting the big things and the small things. And sometimes you don’t know which is which.”

Kalman’s art is a discipline of daily creativity and observation, and she speaks of her work as a form of journalism. Taking photographs, collecting objects and arranging them, writing in notebooks, drawing in journals, painting pictures, making lists — these are the tools she uses to render an ongoing account of the world as she sees it. “Being curious is a completely natural part of it, and being a busybody, and wanting to know what people are doing, and why, and how it works. And why are you wearing those shoes? And what’s that hole puncher for? The nature of curiosity is both about how people live their lives and about the bigger picture of how the world works,” says Kalman.

Expressive of her habits as a collector of odds and ends, traveler, reader, and avid walker, Kalman has created a special installation as a context for the survey furnished with chairs, ladders and “many tables of many things” — balls of string, things that have fallen out of books, moss, lists, bobby pins. The installation invites viewers to observe her way of structuring the world in and outside of the studio.

Specific Works on View

The exhibition includes selections from many of her 12 children’s books including the beloved Oooh-La-La (Max in Love), chronicling the adventures of a Parisian dog poet, and Stay Up Late, her first children’s book created in collaboration with the Talking Heads’ David Byrne. These whimsical books have attracted admirers of all ages, including Ruth Reichl, American food writer and co-producer of PBS’s Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie. “Anybody who has read any of Maira’s books for children will have, as I did, a fantasy of what kind of a world Maira lives in because there is nobody on earth that has a more open imagination, a more exciting way of looking at the world,” says Reichl.

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