Although Chris Ware’s drawings are often trapped in comic-strip grids, calling them comics barely expresses all that he instills in his touching, thought-provoking work. Ware is often credited with elevating the expressive potential of comics and graphic novels. His inspired compositions and acute sensitivity absorb readers into intimate scenarios.

Deeply influenced by the 20th century’s most legendary comic artists, Ware employs their media — Bristol board, India ink, pens, and brushes — to create meticulous graphic stories permeated with detailed imagery drawn from memories of his Omaha boyhood. Ware’s artwork also reflects his appreciation of the architectural richness of Chicago, his home since 1991.

While studying painting and sculpture at the University of Texas, Ware contributed to Art Spiegelman’s comics anthology, Raw. In the early 1990s, Ware “almost” earned a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; it presented him with an honorary doctorate in 2019.

First published in the early 1990s, his book series, The Acme Novelty Library, offered serialized stories that would come to be called graphic novels. Ware’s books, each years in the making, include Jimmy Corrigan — the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), winner of the Guardian First Book Award; Building Stories (2012), a top-10 annual fiction selection of both the New York Times and Time magazine; and Rusty Brown (2019), a New York Times top-100 book. His Monograph (2017) was published by Rizzoli.

Ware has created comics plus more than 30 covers for The New Yorker, and was featured in a 2016 installment of Art21, on PBS. Worldwide gallery exhibitions have included the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; and Galerie Martel, Paris. A retrospective exhibit that debuted at the Centre Pompidou in Paris tours Europe through 2025.

250 Years of Delivering (2025) is Ware’s first project for the U.S. Postal Service.

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