TWO EVENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST TO ILLUSTRATORS are on in New York next week. First, the AI25 and AP22 Silver and Scarlett Gala, Thursday November 9, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. RSVP today.

Then on Saturday, November 11, Parsons The New School for Design presents Illustration Today, an all-day symposium offering spirited discussions about the state of the art. More than twenty-four leading practitioners will share their ideas about a range of topics relevant to illustration in the evolving worlds of publishing and entertainment.

The event is organized by Steven Guarnaccia, Parsons Illustration Department Chair, and former New York Times art director, and Dan Nadel, Parsons Illustration Department Assistant Professor and publisher at PictureBox and The Ganzfeld. Guarnaccia and Nadel will also moderate the discussions.

Among the day’s highlights are:
Keynote Address: Cultural critic Sarah Boxer.
Spotlight: George Hardie, the legendary British illustrator, with illustrator Christoph Niemann.
Graphic Novels: Father and son comics and animation pioneers Kim Deitch and Gene Deitch, with Dan Nadel.
The Illustrator as Author: Children’s book artist Peter Sis, illustrator and film designer Peter De Seve, and author/designer Maira Kalman.
Making Illustration Jump: Top practitioners Psyop, Aaron Stewart, and Paper Rad, with Kenna Kay.
Illustrating in Three Dimensions: British artist James Jarvis and Miami-based designer duo FriendsWithYou talk about transforming two-dimensional characters into three-dimensional objects.

Sponsored in part by American Illustration, Bernstein and Andrulli, Fantagraphics Books, Folioplanet, Giant Robot and Workbook, the event is free for Parsons/New School students and alums with Parsons/New School ID, and $10 for the general public. Tickets are available online.

Steven Guarnaccia is a former art director of the Op Ed page of The New York Times and his illustrations have appeared in books and magazines, on greeting cards for the Museum of Modern Art, on watches for Swatch, and as murals for Disney Cruise Lines. His children’s books include Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Modern (Harry N. Abrams 2000), Skeleton Closet (Hyperion 1996), and Busy Busy City Street (Viking Books 2000), the latter two having been selected by AIGA as winners in its 50 Books/50 Covers competitions. He is the co-author of School Days (Abbeville 1992) and Designing for Children (Watson-Guptill) with Steven Heller. Guarnaccia has has one-person shows in New York, Milan, and Toronto. He has received numerous honors from AIGA, the New York Art Directors Club, and the Society of Publication Designers, among others. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and was a Hallmark Fellow to the Aspen Design Conference.

Dan Nadel is the owner of PictureBox, Inc., a Grammy Award-winning New York-based visual culture studio and publishing company specializing in books by artists and musicians. PictureBox’s authors include Wilco, Black Dice, Paper Rad, Sonic Youth, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Fred Tomaselli, and many others. Its most recent releases include Ninja (Brian Chippendale), Ell-Humour (Julie Doucet), and the acclaimed annual anthology The Ganzfeld. Nadel has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums in North America and Japan, and has published articles about illustration, art, design, and comics in magazines internationally. He is the author of Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969 (Harry N. Abrams 2006).

Sarah Boxer is a critic and the author and illustrator of the cartoon novel, In the Floyd Archives: A Psycho-Bestiary (Pantheon 2001). She writes for Artforum and Smithsonian magazines, and the New York Times. She started working at the New York Times in 1989, first as an editor at the Book Review, then as an editor at the Week in Review. In 2004, she became the first and only critic of arts and culture on the New York Times Website. Boxer is now working on an anthology of blogs and a second cartoon novel.