He is not only marginalized, but may be self-marginalizing, which may also be to his credit. He does not sell his art and he does not navigate the world of fine art very adroitly, which may be to his credit. He has had occasional gallery shows -in Soho in 1974, in Chelsea (NYC) in 1984, at the School of Visual Arts Museum in 1999, and at The CUE Art Foundation in 2004. The kid swore he would never be seduced by Art or cool again…” And it appears as though he hasn’t.
Saddened at his uncoolness he returned to ‘content’ and tried to find its meaning in him. Instead, the abstract canvas walls spoke to each other and left this kid out. He sat in the middle and awaited revelation. Briefly, then, after he graduated from Pratt, he worked as an illustrator for “girlie magazines” and tinkered with abstract art but, as he wrote, “One night he decided to put four paintings together to make a square of four walls. In this interview, Jerry talks about his upbringing and his early life through his enrollment at Pratt in New York in the late ’50s. Moriarty was born in Binghamton, New York, in 1938.
Moriarty is not exactly a cartoonist, per se more of a painter who detoured into cartooning when he drew a remarkable, painterly, strip titled “Jack Survives” about he and his father for Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Raw magazine in the mid '80s. Too few people know Moriarty’s work -which is true of many superlative contemporary cartoonists, of course- and I thought that by publishing it in the bi-annual print edition of The Comics Journal, I could introduce him to new readers and give him some deserved recognition. My original plan, about which more momentarily, was that this would merely be the first of several long interviews that I would stitch together into one massive gab-fest. I consider part of my function as that of an evangelist on behalf of art I love, and therefore think you ought to love, which is the spirit in which I present the following interview.
I conducted this interview with Jerry Moriarty in 2008 at his studio in midtown Manhattan.
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