A memorable scene in the 2021 film C’mon C’mon features Joaquin Phoenix’s character reading to his 9-year-old nephew from Star Child, a book by highly regarded Newton Highlands children’s book author and illustrator Claire A. Nivola. About a flame of vapor that travels to earth to experience human life as a young boy, the book brings tears to Phoenix’s eyes, just as it did to director Mike Mills, who often read the book to his own small boy.
But Mills is not the only one taken with Star Child. Last year C’mon C’mon’s distributor, A24 — known for its roster of exceptional independent films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once, Lady Bird, and Midnight — produced a redesigned special edition of Star Child, which until then was out of print in the original Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition. More recently A24 has packaged Star Child with the author’s The House in the Country, about Ms. Nivola’s remarkable childhood.
The daughter of artists — celebrated sculptor and muralist Costantino Nivola and jewelry designer Ruth Guggenheim — Claire Nivola was raised in Manhattan and Long Island, where her parents counted among their friends and neighbors Saul Steinberg, Willem de Kooning, and Le Corbusier. About growing up in this artistic environment, Ms. Nivola says, “I drew and sculpted from earliest childhood and took art for granted, like breathing and walking.”
Claire Nivola has written and illustrated books about both her parents. Elizabeth (1997) tells the story of a beloved doll her mother left behind in Germany when her family fled the Nazis. The doll was later discovered in a Long Island antique shop and has since been passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter. In Orani: My Father’s Village (2011), Ms. Nivola shares her memories of joyous summers surrounded by her aunts, uncles, and dozens of cousins in the Sardinian village of Orani, where her father grew up and where today one can visit the Nivola Museum, dedicated to her father’s life and sculpture.
All told, Ms. Nivola has illustrated seventeen books — seven of which she also authored — and has worked with legendary children’s book editor Frances Foster on nine of them. Her illustrations combine exquisite color and detail. Outdoor illustrations, especially, often feature marvelously complex patterns, and the indoor illustrations frequently include subtle historical references.
Several of her books present prominent women, as in Life in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle (2012) and Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai (2008). Wangari Maathai is the Nobel Prize- winning Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement. Ms. Nivola, too, is a committed environmentalist. She does not own a car and can be seen biking around Newton or walking through Cold Spring Park.
Ms. Nivola is currently working on a book about Sicilian ornithologist and environmentalist Anna Giordano, to be published in Italian by Gallucci, the publisher of an Italian version of Star Child.
Her work was recently showcased at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA and the museum website offers a beautifully and extensively illustrated in-depth essay about Claire Nivola’s career and work.
Many of Claire Nivola’s books are available online., and special editions of Star Child and A House in the Country are available on A24’s website
