Stanley P. Stone Distinguished Lecture with Artist Lynda Barry

Why do people wish they could write, sing, dance, and draw, long after they’ve given up on these things? Does creative activity have a biological function? There is something common to everything we call the arts. What is it? It’s something Lynda Barry calls ‘an image’, something that feels alive and is contained and transported by something that is not alive—a book, or a song or a painting—anything we call an ‘art form’. This ancient ‘it’ has been around at least as long as we have had hands, and the state of mind it brings about is not plain old ‘thinking’. This talk is about our innate creative ability to work with images and what the biological function of this thing we call ‘the arts’ may be. Please note: There will be swear words, party tricks, and jokes about balls. Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as “among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated.” Widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic and emotional range of American comics, Barry’s seminal comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, ran in alternative newspapers across North America for thirty years.