Drawing at the Margins: A Black Cartoonist’s Journey Through the Arts

Join us for the keynote address of Blind Spots: 13th Annual Illustration Research Symposium, featuring Charles Johnson. The award-winning and prolific writer, philosopher, educator, and cartoonist will discuss the evolution of black comic art. From the damage caused by stereotypical racial images in comics to the pioneering, and little-known, black cartoonists working during the era of segregation, Johnson will offer personal insights into his own journey from the visual arts to the literary arts.

Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King’s Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing, and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.

The keynote address will be held in Umrath Lounge beginning at 5:30 pm, followed by a reception at 7 pm in the Ginkgo Reading Room at John M. Olin Library.