Most of the programming has been planned to take place at the end of the exhibit, May 31 through June 2, so that (among many others) children's book publishers, writers, and illustrators, too, attending BookExpo America (June 2–4, 2000 at McCormick Place), will be able to join in when their schedules allow.

"The Art of the Story" is both the title and the theme of this exhibit and the events planned around it, all of them emphasizing illustration—and the visual and performing arts more generally—in the service of story, and their combined evocative power to enrich the lives of children and young people.

Below you will find just some of the events to look forward to at Northwestern this spring. (Click here to be taken to the full calendar of events.)

the Bologna Illustrators Cafe, sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Chicago, will be recreated in the library (May 31–June 4), bringing together area artists with publishers and art directors visiting Chicago for BookExpo. Special guests will include Francesca Ferrari, director of the Bologna Fair, Kiyoko Matsuoka, curator of the Itabashi Art Museum, Tokyo, Junko Yokota, associate professor of reading and language at the National College of Education, National-Louis University, Stuart Murphy, author of the Mathstart series and a member of this year's Bologna jury, Barbara Elleman, professor of children's literature at Marquette University and author of Tomie DePaola: His Art & His Stories (1999), Davide Stimilli, of Northwestern's own Department of French and Italian, and June Cummins, a children's literature specialist on the faculty of San Diego State University. Note: The Illustrators Cafe will officially open at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, May 31, in the exhibit area, University Library, East Tower, 2nd floor. (Click here to be taken to the full calendar of events.)

a keynote address on the evening of May 31 by Ellen Handler Spitz (Art Department, Stanford University), author of Inside Picture Books (Yale Univ. Pr., 1999), which attracted full-page reviews in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Click here for more information.)

• also on the evening of May 31, a special guest appearance by Chicago's Lifeline Theatre, a company founded by Northwestern drama graduates in the 1980s that for years has brought first-rate fully staged adaptations of classic and contemporary children's literature for Chicago-area children. Following Lifeline's performance, Ellen Spitz will talk with Christina Calvit (NU Speech '81), a Lifeline ensemble member and author of over a dozen theatrical adaptations, about illustration and theatrical interpretation as two different art forms of the story.

• on June 1, in collaboration with Northwestern's Block Museum, an illustrated presentation by Jonathan Fineberg (University of Illinois, Urbana), author of The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist (1997), and Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism, and Modernism (1998) (Click here for more information.)
  
  
• on June 2, an evening with Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The New Yorker and author of this year's ALA Notable Book, Bark, George (1999), published by HarperCollins. (Click here for more information.)