Bill Kartalopoulos, Tony Towle, and John Yau
In conversation: Joe Brainard’s 'The Complete C Comics'
The Evening Lecture Series is free and open to the public. With inquiries, please contact Curator Jacob Brooks.
Joe Brainard was an artist of many forms but perhaps his most exciting work was the comics he put together with his friends. Ron Padgett, Bill Kartalopoulos, and John Yau will discuss The Complete C Comics, the first collection of the two issue of C Comics which he made in 1964 with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Padget, and more. The Complete C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard’s creativity, the joys and possibilities of collaboration, and the explosion of art coming out of the creative hotbed of 1960s New York.
Tony Towle was born in New York in 1939; he began writing poetry in 1960, when he was twenty-one, becoming associated with the New York School starting in 1963, when he took poetry workshops with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara at the New School. His first major collection was North, the Frank O’Hara Award selection for 1970. Since then, Towle has published eleven books of poetry, most recently, Late Studies & Sketches (2025). His My First Three Books (2020), which combines an interview, photographs, and a reading of early poems on a CD, has an introduction by John Yau. In addition to the Frank O’Hara Award, Towle has received grants and fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Poets Foundation, among other honors. Through Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard became Towle’s roommate — from December 1963 to June 1964 (and was a friend thereafter) — coincidentally, the time in which the collaborations for C Comics No. 1 were made.
John Yau is a poet, curator, and art critic who has been publishing reviews and essays on art and literature since 1978. He has authored and contributed to numerous monographs, including Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, Liu Xiaodong, Thomas Nozkowski, Catherine Murphy, John Pai: Liquid Steel, Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert, A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956–1992. His recent books of poetry include Tell It Slant (2023) and Genghis Chan on Drums (2021). Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems1974-2024 is due out this fall. Since 2012, his weekly reviews have appeared in the online magazine, Hyperallergic.
Bill Kartalopoulos is a comics scholar, educator, curator, and editor. He is the Programming Director for the MoCCA Arts Festival and is a member of the organizing committee for the New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium. He was the Series Editor for the #1 New York Times–bestselling Best American Comics series. He teaches graduate level courses about comics at Washington University in St. Louis, the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France. He is currently finishing a book about comics, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
