Atelier@Large: Conversations on Art-making in a Vexed Era — Bill Bowers, E.S. Glenn and Claudia Rankine
Event Overview
Dates
March 24, 2023
Hours
7:30 PM
Location
James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau St.
Admission
Free tickets required; open to public
In a series of conversations that bring guest artists to campus to discuss what they face in making art in the modern world, director of the Princeton Atelier and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon moderates a discussion with Broadway actor and mime Bill Bowers, cartoonist for The New Yorker E.S. Glenn, and poet and playwright Claudia Rankine.
Per Princeton University policy, all visitors are expected to be either fully vaccinated, have recently received and prepared to show proof of a negative COVID test (via PCR within 72 hours or via rapid antigen within 8 hours of the scheduled visit), or agree to wear a face covering when indoors and around others.
Accessibility
The James Stewart Film Theater is wheelchair accessible. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.
About the Guest Artists
Bill Bowers. Photo credit Frank Veronsky
As an actor, mime and educator, Bill Bowers has traveled throughout all 50 of the United States, Europe and Asia. His Broadway credits include Zazu in The Lion King and Leggett in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Off Broadway and in theaters around the world, Bowers has written and performed his own plays including ‘Night Sweetheart ‘Night Buttercup, Under a Montana Moon, It Goes Without Saying, Beyond Words and All Over the Map. He has been hailed by critics as “the great American mime,” winning top honors at festivals throughout the world. In addition to theater, he is featured in the film Two Weeks Notice and on television in Remember W.E.N.N., One Life to Live, All My Children, on Disney’s Out of the Box, and in the PBS documentary series Brief But Spectacular. Bowers holds an MFA from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts and an Honorary PhD from Rocky Mountain College. He is a student of the legendary Marcel Marceau, and he presently serves on the faculties of NYU, Stella Adler Studios, and the William Esper Studio.
E. S. Glenn, in full Everett Samuel Glenn, is a regular cartoonist for The New Yorker. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1985, he began drawing as a child and was supported by his teachers because, according to his own account, he was otherwise a very impetuous boy. Glenn began keeping graphic-novel-style diaries at an early age and began to craft a method of hiding his personal experiences behind action scenes. He attended the Cleveland School of the Arts, continued drawing while serving in the Navy, and spent many years in New York selling his comics in the underground and indie scenes. His path eventually led him to Leipzig; comic artist Ralph Niese, who died in 2020, was his mentor. Glenn lost his wife Camino, with whom he had commuted between Vienna and Berlin, in 2021. In his debut, Unsmooth #1 [2020], Glenn puts his alter ego in the spotlight: an aspiring artist, struggling with self-doubt and ambivalence about the art scene, joins a gang of small-time gangsters and becomes entangled in their criminal enterprises. According to The Comic Journal, “It is a complex meditation on masculinity, race, class, the art world and the act of cartooning, dressed up to look like a stylish thriller, and drawn with heaps of confidence and skill.” The follow-up volume, Unsmooth #2: BUM [2021], is the prequel to the debut in which Glenn uses a formally experimental and multi-layered approach to explore the feeling of existential fear.
Photo courtesy Blue Flower Arts
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
