Two New Yorker cartoonists sit down with museum director Kristy Edmunds on October 17 to talk about the thing hiding at the back of everyone's refrigerator, ahead of their new book's release.
On Saturday, October 17, MASS MoCA hosts New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein for an evening built around a subject some people might rather not examine too closely: their own kitchens. The 7pm talk in the Hunter Center comes two weeks after the release of their joint book, The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation.
Chast and Katzenstein started the collaboration from a shared confession—that their own kitchens looked nothing like the elegant spaces that dominate food media—and built a 192-page conversation in comics dissecting their insecurities and inadequacies surrounding their lifelong ineptitude in culinary domesticity: Tupperware drawers that defy geometry, refrigerators that make unexplained noises, pantries that resemble a goblin’s hoard.
Some pages are drawn by Chast in her jittery, instantly recognizable line, some by Katzenstein in a rounder, cartoonier hand, and some are collaborations, including a few photo comics mixed in with the drawn material. Ruth Reichl, the longtime food writer and former Gourmet editor, blurbed it: "Everyone not named Martha Stewart will recognize themselves.”
Chast has been one of the most celebrated cartoonists at the New Yorker since starting there in 1978, publishing more than a thousand cartoons in the magazine over the decades. Her graphic memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, about her aging parents, spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and became the first graphic novel to make the National Book Award's adult nonfiction shortlist. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for that book, received the National Humanities Medal in 2024, and was inducted into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2025.
At this point she is surely one of America’s most celebrated self-deprecators and while she doesn’t live in the RI Region, she’s pretty close, with a home just over the Litchfield border. So we can claim her.
Katzenstein's own New Yorker work runs alongside credits at MAD Magazine and the New York Times; he's also the illustrator behind Camp Midnight, a middle-grade graphic novel duology, and the author of Everything Is an Emergency, a graphic memoir about living with OCD.
The Hunter Center event is structured as an onstage interview with MASS MoCA director Kristy Edmunds.
Advance tickets are $25; a $45 "preferred" ticket includes a copy of the book and access to a post-talk signing in the lobby, where Chast and Katzenstein will both be on hand. Those who can't make it to North Adams can order a copy through MASS MoCA's own shop and have it signed on their behalf.
MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247
Tickets at massmoca.org.
