Art Spiegelman at The High School of Art & Design

NEW YORK. Art Spiegelman, who chronicled his father’s experience in Auschwitz in a then-improbable medium, a comic book entitled Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, is at work on his first public art project, a glass mural for the high school he attended in New York.

The mural, now in production at a factory in Munich, won’t be installed until more than a year from now says the artists, in a corridor at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, which will move into a huge multi-use structure on East 56th Street, near its original location on 2nd Avenue and 57th Street. Spiegelman said the provisional title of the work was It Was Today, Only Yesterday.

“It’s about the past, present and future, since it’s my old high school. It’s looking back and looking forward from the present, so it makes a three-paneled comic strip, with one panel of past, one panel of present, one panel of future,” said the author. “It functions with panels moving in time. People get to walk back and forth between past and future.”

“There are lots of colours — very comic book colours, and it’s very comic book inflected,” he said.

Like much of his work, the mural will have autobiographical elements. “From the back, should someone be patient and hold up a mirror to the text, one can read the open spread of a book, which consists of three anecdotes, cut off at the beginning and the end — the book is called Spiegelman: The Early Years, and it consists of high school memories.”

“We have nothing on glass yet,” cautioned the author of Maus, who was reluctant to provide additional details.

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