When cartoonist Joe Wos was first caught drawing on the walls of his home as a kid, his parents weren’t upset. They weren’t angry, and they didn’t scream. Instead, they said, “Go ahead,” encouraging him to keep drawing.
As a child, he was influenced by some of the most recognizable cartoon characters around, Charlie Brown and the whole Peanuts gang. Wos also grew up during the 1970s “maze craze,” buying and solving maze books with his friends, who then began creating their own mazes and challenging one another. The future artist constructed his own twisting paths and puzzles, outsmarting his friends while developing what would become his ongoing art practice.
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“What was always unique about my mazes is the illustrations are actually integrated, solvable parts of the maze,” Wos says. “Even at that early age.”
It was the start of his journey as a cartoonist and the foundation of his most recent book, A-Maze-Ing Peanuts: 100 Mazes Featuring Charlie Brown and Friends, as well as the City Museum’s exhibit and collaboration with the cartoonist, MazeToons.
MazeToons is an interactive exhibit where guests make their way through a maze of colorful, refurbished office doors featuring Wos’ illustrations. Prior to the museum reaching out with a collaboration offer, Wos often visited St. Louis while touring nationwide. He remembers falling in love with the museum on his very first visit.
“I said, ‘This is the greatest museum in the world,’” he recalls. “I would say you have no business building a museum or running a museum until you have been to the City Museum in St. Louis.”
Even more impressive to Wos was City Museum’s incredibly similar vision for an exhibit—an idea the cartoonist said he had been thinking about for more than 25 years. “Without me telling them a single detail, they replicated [the exhibit concept I had in mind],” Wos says. “This was a dream turned into reality for me.”
The collaborative process included narrowing down more than 300 potential artworks to feature, and Wos even created an exclusive maze for the exhibit that depicts some artifacts and imagery from the museum itself. Soon, the cartoonist will make his way back to St. Louis for a weekend of meet and greets and live shows from August 19-21. These kinds of interactive programs are nothing new for Wos, who also has an educational show on PBS called Cartoon Academy, where kids and adults can learn how to draw.
“Everything I do is collaborative between me and my audience, whether it’s performing on stage or the mazes that they see in the newspaper,” Wos says. “I really love the idea of being a part of this exhibit, to actually get out there so that people can know that there’s an artist behind this.”
Mazetoons runs at City Museum until August 28. A full schedule of Wos’ visiting dates can be found online.
