The Art of the New Yorker Cover

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Kadir Nelson is an award-winning author and artist based in Los Angeles. His numerous New Yorker covers have featured contemporary and historical figures, including George Floyd, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, as well as everyday people. His paintings are featured in the Hall of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and many other collections. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone and National Geographic and on the TV shows “Black-ish” and “This Is Us.” Nelson has also written and illustrated more than thirty children’s books, including “We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball” and “Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans.” In 2020, he won the Caldecott Medal and was named the Coretta Scott King Book Award illustrator winner for his artwork for “The Undefeated,” written by Kwame Alexander.

Malika Favre is a French artist based in Barcelona. She illustrated her first cover for The New Yorker in 2016 and has since become a regular contributor, focussing on women’s empowerment. She has helped expand the form by animating a number of her cover illustrations, including “Sweeping Into Fall,” “The Butterfly Effect,” and “Coding 101.” In the lead-up to the 2016 Presidential election, she created a never published cover, titled “The First,” that would have marked a victory by Hillary Clinton. Favre’s work has also appeared in Vogue, National Geographic, Metropolitan, and the Times.

Françoise Mouly has been The New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, overseeing more than fourteen hundred covers, many of them named Cover of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. She is also the publisher, designer, and editorial director of Toon Books, an imprint specializing in children’s comics, which she founded in 2008. From 1980 to 1992, Mouly published and co-edited Raw, the influential comics magazine, and in 2017 she published “Resist!,” a collection of comics and graphics primarily by women, co-edited with her daughter, the writer Nadja Spiegelman. In 2011, Mouly received France’s highest honor, the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, and in 2015 she was the recipient of the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. Last year, she was inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Award Hall of Fame.

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