Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: D C-T!
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1986
WEBSITE: http://joanaavillez.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017154238
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017154238
HEADING: Avillez, Joana
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040 __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF
100 1_ |a Avillez, Joana
370 __ |e New York (N.Y.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Illustration of books |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Illustrators |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Women |2 lcdgt
670 __ |a Courage is contagious, c2017: |b t.p. (illustrations by Joana Avillez)
670 __ |a Joana Avillez website, Nov. 22, 2017 |b (Joana Avillez; lives in N.Y.; attended The Rhode Island School of Design; studied illustration at The School of Visual Arts)
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1986.
EDUCATION:Attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Illustrator and writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Joana Avillez is a freelance illustrator whose clients include New York magazine, the New York Times, the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Bon Appétit, Marie Claire, Vice, and other periodicals and online publications. She is also a book illustrator, including illustrating cookbooks, a collection of essays, and actor’s Lena Dunham’s book Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned. Avillez is also illustrator and coauthor with Molly Young of D C-T! The authors borrow from a playful language first created by William Steig, the American cartoonist, sculptor, and illustrator and writer of children’s books, in his classic 1968 word puzzle book CDB! Avillez and Young tell a separate, illustrated story on each page of D C-T! “They’ve used his phonetic puzzle language to grasp the character and cadence of life in New York City — or, as they call it, D C-T,” wrote Anna Shechtman in the Los Angeles Review of Books website.
Both Avillez and Young were introduced to the work of Steig, who also created the character of Shrek, by their fathers, to whom they dedicate D C-T! Avillez and Young and their fathers did not know each other and actually lived thousands of miles from each other as the authors were growing up. Avillez was born and raised in New York while Young grew up in San Francisco, California but has lived in New York for more than a decade. “I read every William Steig book with my dad,” Avillez told Shechtman in an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books website. Rotten Island, Brave Irene, Amos & Boris … The kind of illustration I love most — a funny and deceptively simple drawn line — is utter Steig. Molly and I, we can do together what one person, Steig, did so well alone.”
Avillez and Young were also inspired to create D C-T! by the female code breakers of World War II. Writing for the Lenny Letter – Feminism, Political issues & Current website, the authors explain that the U.S. military sent letters to female college students during World War II in which they asked questions like whether or not the women like crossword puzzles. The letters were part or a recruitment strategy. Women who responded then went through an application process. Those who passed where sent to Washington, DC, to work on deciphering enemy codes. Avillez and Young wrote in the website article: “The military recruiters understood something that the private sector hadn’t yet discovered, which is that women could break code as well as men. Or maybe better.”
Using a type playful phonetic language first invented by Steig but which seems contemporary in the modern world of text messaging and internet shorthand, Avillez and Young differ from Steig in their approach in that D C-T! is meant or adults. For example, a clerk at a bodega spies a seemingly blissed out shopper and asks “R U I?” (Are you high?) Writing in the book’s introduction, Avillez and Young note: “D C-T! is a book of puzzles in the key of New York. The illustrations are the illustrations. The letters are the captions. Decode the captions by verbalizing them out loud. It that doesn’t work, seek the advice of a child.”
For example, one illustration depicts a boy shouting gleefully at rats scurry around a pile of rubbish. The caption is “S L-I-F!,” or It’s alive! In another illustration a boy with a skateboard encounters some New York policemen and tells the skeptical cops that he is drinking “S I-S T,” or iced tea. “I M B-Z,” I’m busy, is the caption for a businesswoman wielding her phone to ward of a mugger.
The book includes a key in the back to help readers decipher the letters if needed. “Even competitive solvers will be stumped by some of the book’s ‘Easter eggs’ — surprise puzzles buried inside of the image, whose answers aren’t included in the key,” Avillez noted in the interview with Los Angeles Review of Books website contributor Shechtman. In a review of D-CT!, a Publishers Weekly Online contributor remarked: “Like a sticky song, these puzzle comics evoke both delight and mild annoyance.”
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
Joana Avillez website, http://joanaavillez.com (July 28, 2018).
Lenny Letter – Feminism, Political issues & Current Events, https://www.lennyletter.com/ (May 10, 2018), Joana Avillez and Molly Young, “A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II: Behind D C-T!, a Book of Illustrated Cryptograms.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (May 4, 2018), Anna Shectman, “In Which New York City Is Also a Character,” author interview.
New York Online, http://nymag.com/ (April 19, 2018), review of D C-T!
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (April 26, 2018), Joana Avillez and Molly Young, “N 8-F Life in D C-T.”
Nylon, https://nylon.com/ (May 1, 2018), Kristin Iversen, “Watch Joana Avillez and Molly Young Bring ‘D C-T!’ To Life.”
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 5, 2018), review of D C-T!
I am represented by Art Department.
Stephanie Pesakoff: stephaniep@art-dept.com
Elinor Vanderburg: elinortv@art-dept.com
Hi! I am an illustrator from and still living and working in
New York. I grew up in a fish market, but escaped to attend
The Rhode Island School of Design, and returned to NYC to
study illustration at The School of Visual Arts.
I love drawing and writing together as one.
Please feel free to get in touch, hire me, or just say hello!
Clients Include:
New York Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
Vogue, Real Simple, McSweeney's, The Believer, Refinery29,
Paper Magazine, GOOD, Bon Appétit, Marie Claire, Vice, FLOS,
goop, Tablet, Cosmopolitan, Womens Wear Daily, Zeit Magazine,
Lucky Peach, The United Nations, Vanity Fair, Penguin,
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Departures, Gucci,
The Paris Review, Random House, and Hermès.
I sell original drawings and illustrations at Picture Room.
If interested, please get in touch: info@pictureroom.shop
Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram
In Which New York City Is Also a Character
By Anna Shechtman
18 0 0
MAY 4, 2018
JOANA AVILLEZ AND Molly Young work well with others. Avillez, an illustrator whose drawings mix the canniness of street photography with the charm of a bar napkin scribble, has collaborated on essay collections, cookbooks, and wallpaper. Young — who lives life like a rebus puzzle, making words of things and things of words — has partnered to create callings cards emblazoned with compliments, cheeky mugs, and a “Periodic Table of NYC Trash.”
In their first collaboration together, Avillez and Young have updated William Steig’s children’s book classics CDB! and CDC?. They’ve used his phonetic puzzle language to grasp the character and cadence of life in New York City — or, as they call it, D C-T. Theirs is a shared sensibility — not-suitable-for-children childlike wonder — that is itself a product of their New York City lives.
¤
ANNA SHECHTMAN: How did this collaboration come about?
JOANA AVILLEZ: Well, Molly and I both went to college in Providence, Rhode Island — but I’m not even sure that we met there.
MOLLY YOUNG: We were certainly aware of each other.
JA: We share an ex-boyfriend.
Were you … rivals?
JA: A Betty and Veronica situation. You have words, I have pictures.
MY: And because we shared an ex-boyfriend, let’s say society had organized us as opponents.
So how did your friendship emerge? Or, your collaboration — I shouldn’t presume that you’re friends.
JA: [Laughs.] We are. But this was a while ago. Finally, three years ago, we had a first date, and the idea to do a project together emerged. After that we moved very quickly, finessing a book proposal within months. Someone on Twitter suggested that we dedicate [D C-T!] to the shared ex-boyfriend, and I found that so boring.
Well, it’s not dedicated to him. It’s dedicated to your dads. Why’s that?
MY: Our dads were the ones who introduced us to William Steig. Separately, of course. My dad gave me CDB! when I was a little kid, and I was immediately addicted to its verbal puzzles.
JA: I read every William Steig book with my dad. Rotten Island, Brave Irene, Amos & Boris … The kind of illustration I love most — a funny and deceptively simple drawn line — is utter Steig. Molly and I, we can do together what one person, Steig, did so well alone.
Does D C-T! have a New York City origin story?
JA: Not really. If you go back to the first email about it, Molly was just like, “Hey, I have all of these codes written, and maybe we could make a zine.”
MY: I had an office job then, and when I was bored at work, I would come up with codes and keep them in a Google Doc. Steig invented a whole new puzzle language, and produced CDB! and a sequel called CDC?, and then no one else ran with the puzzle language. It’s almost like someone invented Sudoku and then there were two of them published and that’s it. Or a crossword puzzle. It seemed like a form that someone else should play with.
I love that you call them codes. I wasn’t sure what to call them — “captions” doesn’t do them justice — because there’s such intense symbiosis between word and image. Did the code always come before the image in the creative process?
MY: Whenever I do a collaboration with someone, I seem to black out during the process and then mystically emerge with a creation of some sort. I literally have no memory of what actually happens — who said what, edited what, improved what — when it’s over. I assume Joana and I got along very well because I was in a great mood through the entire lengthy process.
What we have in common is an appetite for specificity. One of us would be walking down the street and see some typical New York scene — a trash can after the rain, stuffed with broken cheapo umbrellas — and immediately convey it to the other person and then devise a narrative around it. It was a very chaotic creative process.
JA: But we’re also very organized. Our brains are now kerned to anticipate what would benefit the other.
MY: Chaos distilled into Google Docs.
There are some marked differences between CDB! and D C-T!. Steig’s book is very obviously a children’s book. I can’t imagine that your book is being marketed that way.
MY: I would say that the book is inappropriate for children, but that they are encouraged to locate it somehow and spend furtive quality time with it. Parents might be uncomfortable showing it to their kids — which is exactly the kind of book that kids tend to like most.
JA: Like many people, the books that I looked at when my parents’ weren’t at home — and not just for nudity — are the ones that I remember best. However, I happen to know a very astute seven-year-old who has solved more of our puzzles than most eligible readers.
Your book is also harder than Steig’s books. You actually include a key in case solvers are stumped. Tell me about that decision.
MY: Actually CDC? had a key.
JA: When we were asking people about whether to include a key, there was a strangely gendered response: a lot of women thought we definitely should, a lot of men said no.
Right, well in my experience, more men than women consider looking up crossword clues cheating. But even competitive solvers will be stumped by some of the book’s “Easter eggs” — surprise puzzles buried inside of the image, whose answers aren’t included in the key.
JA: Totally.
MY: It’s pregnant with Easter eggs. There’s even a crossword puzzle scene, now that you mention it. A puzzle-within-a-puzzle, for the diehard puzzleheads.
Do you imagine that D C-T! will be the first in a series? Can L.A. residents expect N L-A?
JA: If we did a sequel, I’m not sure it would necessarily be another city — à la Miroslav Šašek’s beautiful children’s books This Is Paris, This Is Venice, This Is New York, et cetera. In our case, the city was just the perfect raucous home for the form.
There’s a lot of New York pride in this book, not least because it’s called D C-T! and not A C-T!.
JA: Yeah, at my high school [in Brooklyn] people used to call Manhattan “the city.” Roz Chast’s most recent book, Going Into Town, captures some of that sense of wonder and pride and reverence for the city. If you don’t retain some of that, it’d be impossible to live in this belly of a beast who also has acid reflux.
Did you learn each other’s New Yorks from working together?
MY: We did learn each other’s New Yorks, and there was a lot of overlap.
JA: There was, and I think it’s good that Molly isn’t from New York. She’s from San Francisco — still a city gal. Overall, we wanted the book to work more like The Philharmonic Gets Dressed than a slideshow of tourist attractions.
MY: Yes, Joana and I are both less preoccupied by physical landmarks of New York, and more interested in the mythos of the city, the petty conflicts, subway etiquette, the fact that fabulous freaks still make their home here, the omnipresence of rats, the dynamic of walking behind people who are too slow —
JA: — the microaggressions. The attitude and feeling.
MY: It’s about humans living in proximity and how they cope.
Do you have a favorite page?
MY: I M B-Z. It captures the state of modern woman.
¤
Anna Shechtman is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She writes crossword puzzles for The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Daily Shouts
N 8-F Life in D C-T
By Joana Avillez and Molly YoungApril 26, 2018
In 1968, the artist and author William Steig published “CDB!,” a collection of illustrations paired with encrypted captions, which readers young and old were invited to decode. Inspired by Steig’s book, Joana Avillez and Molly Young set out to make “D C-T!,” set in present-day New York City. They recommend solving the captions by reading them out loud. (Or, if you get desperate, by checking the answer key at the bottom of this page.)
Answer key:
O-D-S: Odious
D-Z-N!: Dizzying!
S Q! S E-T-B-T: “It’s cute!” “It’s itty-bitty.”
G-M: Gym
L: Hell
I M N 8-F: I am a native.
These illustrations were drawn from “D C-T!,” by Joana Avillez and Molly Young, to be published on May 1st by Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Molly Young is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.Read more »
Watch Joana Avillez And Molly Young Bring ‘D C-T!’ To Life
Talking with the author and illustrator of an incredibly charming new book
BY KRISTIN IVERSEN · MAY 01, 2018
Watch Joana Avillez And Molly Young Bring ‘D C-T!’ To Life
What does it mean to be a city person? Or, more specifically, a New Yorker? Some would say you need to have lived here for 10-plus years, whereas others think the requirement starts at birth; like, unless you were born and raised in New York, it simply doesn't count. And while it's possible to make a solid argument for either of those qualifications, with today's release of D C-T!, I'd like to suggest that the real tell of a New Yorker is whether or not they're able to decipher all the coded messages inside this clever, funny, beautifully wrought new book.
D C-T! is the creation of illustrator Joana Avillez (born-and-raised New Yorker) and writer Molly Young (who has lived in New York for over a decade), who have been friends for some time now (they shared—at different times!—an ex-boyfriend, who clearly had excellent taste). The two also share a love for writer and illustrator William Steig, whose work both women were introduced to when they were children, who created the coded language which Young employs throughout D C-T! in his book, CDB!
"It's entirely written in code," Young explains of the book's text, which comprises at-first enigmatic captions, like the letter "L" (aka hell), alongside an illustration of an off-brand Elmo frolicking in Times Square. And while the phonetic code can be sorted through by reading the numbers and letters out loud (there's also an answer key in the back), it becomes all the more rewarding and fun to do so by guessing the meaning based on the illustrations. As Avillez points out, "It's a very symbiotic word and picture exercise."
You'll also have an easier time deciphering the meaning if you're familiar with New York, a place which lends itself to coded messages, and whose quirks and idiosyncrasies have become iconic far and wide; it's the ur city. Young says, "Anything that's present in an American city is present in a really concentrated degree in New York."
And the kind of things which are present in New York—people clipping their nails on a subway platform, cockroaches scurrying across a living room floor, a couple asking each other for help with the Sunday crossword—are fully present in D C-T! as well, which is organized by season, and filled with all the attendant woes of a four-season city. And yet, while it conveys the annoyances of grim winters and ultra-humid summers, D C-T! is a purely delightful experience, one which will have you and your friends debating the relative merits and drawbacks of certain kinds of pests (while Young finds cockroaches to be the nadir of New York vermin, Avillez thinks native New Yorkers would prefer roaches to rats), and falling in love all over again with New York, and just all cities, in general, which are, as Young points out, just a "thin layer of structure on top of a teeming heap of chaos." Who could ask for anything more?
D C-T! is available for purchase now. And you can get to know Joana and Molly and watch the book come to life in the video, below.
Credits:
Camera: Charlotte Prager and Dani Okon
Editor: Dani Okon
A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II
Behind D C-T!, a book of illustrated cryptograms.
BY JOANA AVILLEZ AND MOLLY YOUNG
May 10, 2018
During World War II the U.S. military sent letters to female college students across the country asking if they liked crossword puzzles, among other questions. The mysterious letters were part of a recruitment strategy to bring cryptanalysts (read: code breakers) to the nation’s capitol. The women who responded — and who made it through the application process — were sent to D.C, given desks in nondescript rooms, and put to work in secrecy to dismantle enemy code systems. Everyone else thought they were secretaries. Ha!
The military recruiters understood something that the private sector hadn’t yet discovered, which is that women could break code as well as men. Or maybe better.
This is one of the threads that inspired us to collaborate on a book of illustrated codes called D C-T!. The book takes place in New York. The scenes each contain a cryptogram to solve. Some are easy, some are ruinously tricky. Solving tip: pronounce the letters out loud to yield a caption.
A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II
Gauthier, Danielle
Molly Young: This image is about the condition of the modern woman.
Joana Avillez: When I was drawing this, I channeled the energy of my best friend Isabel. This was confirmed to me when she saw the illustration and said: “That’s me.” Of course, in reality Isabel would never react like the character in the drawing, but it quickly gets to the heart of what New Yorkers are best known for: being extremely slow and nice.
A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II
Gauthier, Danielle
MY: Obviously a book of puzzles would need to contain within its pages an illustrated crossword puzzle, for a puzzle-in-puzzle effect.
JA: To quote MC Escher, maestro of said effect, “My work is a game, a very serious game.” I love this one because it’s how I am with all crossword puzzles, even the ones in UsWeekly.
A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II
Gauthier, Danielle
MY: This is an ode to “me-time.” As with most people, the only locking door in my house as a child was the bathroom. As a result, the bathroom was my sole oasis of guaranteed privacy, at least for brief interludes of time. As an adult woman I still cherish the privacy of that magical “click” in the door.
JA: I was definitely thinking about Carol Burnett’s Mrs. Hanningan from Annie when illustrating this code. In one memorable scene from the movie, a tipsy negligee-clad Mrs. Hanningan croons a very deranged tune while drawing herself a bath. Stirring it all with a wooden paddle, the tub becomes a place for ingredients more typically found in a bar. For better or worse, I tried to mimic this scene as a child — but I used bubble bath and a wooden spoon from the kitchen.
A New Book Inspired by Female Code Breakers of World War II
Gauthier, Danielle
JA: People-watching reaches its sunny apex at the beach, so I never go without a pen and paper. Inhibitions are either out the door or front and center. This drawing is mentally made of up past excursions drawing people at Brighton Beach, the Rockaways, Robert Moses Beach, and all the other crazy and crowded New York sandboxes.
I was also thinking about one time in particular, when my friends and I took the subway to Coney Island in high school. We swam in our underwear and lay down towel-less. We befriended our more outfitted neighbors and danced with them and their boombox till nightfall. Sunburnt and full of hot dogs, we fell asleep on each other’s shoulders on the train ride home. It’s one of my favorite memories and I wanted to imbue some of the dirtiness and fun that comes from inescapable proximity into this illustration.
From D C-T! by Joana Avillez and Molly Young, published on May 1st by Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Molly Young is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. She has written features for GQ, Elle, New York magazine, n+1 and other publications, and has authored columns for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times. She has also published crossword puzzles in the New York Times.
Joana Avillez is an illustrator from and still living in New York. Her drawings and illustrated stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, New York magazine, Zeit Magazin, Apartamento, and many other places. She illustrated Lena Dunham's memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.
None Found in Gale
D C-T!
Joana Avillez and Molly Young. Penguin Press, $20 (95p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2319-6
Visually and textually witty, D C-T (pronounced, with implied humorous accent, “The City”) is a riff on William Steig’s 1968 collection of word puzzles, CDB. Avillez’s cunning vignettes depict sights that will be familiar to New Yorker readers as well as actual New Yorkers: fire escapes, subways, restaurants, Fran Lebowitz. The collection is a mix of old and new. On one hand, it’s a minimally colored, self-proclaimed paean (“P-N”) to Steig and perhaps to a form of wordplay not often indulged outside of Will Shortz’s universe. On the other, the premise inherently invokes text culture and its Twitterverse renaissance. The fast-paced C-T is always looking for shortcuts, even as Avillez and coauthor Young take time to appreciate small urban moments, from a rat watching a video on a smartphone (it’s a big-screen TV for him) to a young skateboarder telling skeptical cops that the drink in his hand is iced tea (“S I-S T”). Like a sticky song, these puzzle comics evoke both delight and mild annoyance, and there’s a key in the back if the latter overwhelms. But it’s hard to stay mad when there’s a rat or pigeon in a dapper hat on every other page of this breezy charmer. Agents: David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management, and Seth Fishman, The Gernert Company. (May)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 02/05/2018
Release date: 05/01/2018
D C-T! by Molly Young and Joana Avillez
Writer and frequent Strategist contributor Molly Young (and noted lover of beef jerky and orthopedic boots) partnered up with illustrator and Strategist also-contributor Joana Avillez (she of the perfect mom earrings) to pen and draw this modern-day homage to cartoonist William Steig. The book is ostensibly about life in New York but otherwise slightly uncategorizable: it’s part comic book, part ethnography, part love letter.