On Wednesday, we had the pleasure of attending the preview of a brilliant new exhibit on now at the Art Gallery of Ontario showcasing the work of one of the world’s most renowned comic artists Art Spiegelman entitled Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective. On the walls of the AGO is a lifetime’s work of an artist who was instrumental in bringing comics and graphic magazines into the mainstream art world and destroying the barrier between high and low art.

Best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (which spawned a sequel Maus II and the making-of novel MetaMaus), a sprawling comic book about his parents’ experience in Auschwitz during the second world war, one of Spiegelman’s lesser-known works is one directly connected with Acting Up Stage. Following the success of Maus, Spiegelman published an illustrated version of Joseph Moncure March’s long-forgotten poem The Wild Party (about 70 years after it was originally written). The new spotlight on the poem was surely an inspiration for the two musicals that premiered only six years after the reissue based on the same poem. Acting Up Stage’s next production is one of those two musicals - Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party. (Between this AGO exhibit, The Wild Party, and an upcoming lecture with Spiegelman presented by the Koffler Centre of the Arts in January, there is definitely an Art-istic moment happening in Toronto.) More