Devoted to Illustration

The Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies brings new scholarly attention and resources to the art of illustration, a profoundly influential aspect of American visual culture. Through  online research tools and collections access,  scholarship, and spurring the collection and preservation of important artworks, the Rockwell Center establishes a context for understanding the role of illustration art in shaping and reflecting American culture.

The Rockwell Center houses four programs:

• Illustration Partnership Network
• Norman Rockwell Archives and ProjectNORMAN
• Illustration Art Collection
• Rockwell Scholars Program

Illustration Partnership Network

The Rockwell Center’s fosters partnership and collaboration with museums, universities, libraries and archives with significant collections and focus on American illustration arts, forming a national network of institutions dedicated to presentation, preservation and scholarship of visual communication art. This network invites discourse and provides scholars with access to the nation’s richest holdings of illustration collections and publishing.

The Rockwell Center adds a new scholarly field to a national consortium of art history research centers located at museums who form the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), a distinguished association of research institutes at our nation’s most prestigious museums.

Norman Rockwell Archives and ProjectNORMAN

ProjectNORMAN (New Online Rockwell Media Art and Archive Network), a ten-year, comprehensive online publishing project to preserve, catalogue, computerize and digitize its collection of original artworks, and over 150,000 archival objects, making them accessible to researchers, was begun in 2003.

Illustration Art Collection

The Norman Rockwell Museum has begun to expand its collections beyond Norman Rockwell to build a collection of art of other illustrators. Norman Rockwell Museum is one of the nation’s premiere collections for this significant aspect of material culture and visual communication.

Rockwell Scholars’ Program

The Center supports research in the field of American illustration and visual studies. Scholars, graduate students, and museum professionals are invited to apply for Rockwell Scholars’ fellowships. Working with art, library, and studio collections at the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Rockwell Center’s nationwide members’ museums and illustration collections, scholars will study the relationship of illustration art to popular culture, social history, mass media, formal art history and other disciplines.