Film Forum will present the US theatrical premiere of Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE on Friday, February 21.

Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus is a landmark in reckoning with the Holocaust and breakthrough in serious comic art — but his full achievements are more remarkable and eclectic. ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE tracks his beginnings in the 1960s as co-creator of the Wacky Packages trading cards; his co-founding of the underground comics magazines Arcade (with Bill Griffith) and Raw (with wife Françoise Mouly); In the Shadow of No Towers, his reaction to 9/11, inspired by witnessing the attacks from his home in lower Manhattan; his controversial covers for The New Yorker (1993-2003) that prompted the NYPD to picket the magazine’s office; and his public response to Maus’s recent ban by a Tennessee school board. 

Spiegelman proves an eloquent guide through his provocative work, along with contemporaries (Robert Crumb, Gary Panter) and younger cartoonists (Joe Sacco, Jerry Craft, Molly Crabapple) inspired by Spiegelman’s unflinching confrontation of personally traumatic themes.

The film had its world premiere at the 2024 DOC NYC where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in the festival’s Metropolis competition, dedicated to stories about New Yorkers and New York City.

Film Forum premiered Bernstein and Dolin’s previous films DECEPTIVE PRACTICE: THE MYSTERIES AND MENTORS OF RICKY JAY (2013) and THE ART THAT NATURE MAKES: THE WORK OF ROSAMOND PURCELL (2016). 

ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE is presented in association with Film Forum’s repertory series Tales from The New Yorker, a two-week series celebrating the iconic magazine’s first century with a slate of over 30 films inspired by the fiction and reporting from its pages, and by the legendary writers who helped define it, running from Friday, February 21 to Thursday, March 6.