Partners’ Exhibitions
This listing includes exhibits at Rockwell Center partners institutions and exhibits partner institutions are traveling around the country.
Herblock!
The Library of Congress
October 13, 2009–May 1, 2010
The Library of Congress celebrates Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Herb Block (1909–2001) with a look at his remarkable seventy-two-year career (1929–2001). Herblock! includes eighty-two original cartoon drawings, primarily selected from the Library’s extensive Herbert L. Block Collection. These cartoons represent Block’s ability to wield his pen effectively and artfully, using it to condemn corruption and expose injustice, inequality, and immorality on topics including the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II, communism and the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy, race relations, Richard Nixon, the Reagan era, the 2000 election, and more.
American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Saturday November 14, 2009 – Sunday February 7, 2010
Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, this national traveling exhibition of original art from the Museum’s noted collections returns to Stockbridge for the summer of our 40th anniversary year. The exhibition chronicles Rockwell’s life and art, introducing new scholarship rooted in decades of study by Curator of Norman Rockwell Collections, Linda Pero. The artist’s paintings, drawings, and studies span 56 years, from his 1914 interpretation of American folk hero Daniel Boone securing safe passage for settlers to the American West, to his 1970 report on American tourists and armed Israeli soldiers witnessing a Christmas Eve ceremony at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Golden Legacy: Original Art From 65 Years of Golden Books
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
November 24 – February 28, 2010
See the original illustrations of these beloved books including the the best-selling children’s book of all time, The Poky Little Puppy. Launched in 1942—the first full year of America’s involvement in the Second World War, Little Golden Books made high quality illustrated books available at affordable prices for the first time to millions of young children and their parents. There will be special programming surrounding this exhibit of more than 60 original works.
Brandywine River Museum
through March 14, 2010
Tony Sarg (1880-1942),
Laughing Lion (1930), ink, crayon,
pencil and gouache on mounted
illustration board, collection of
the Brandywine River Museum,
gift of Jane Collette Wilcox.
The best cartoons rivet public attention to ideas and attitudes. Visual humor can garner public awareness of issues and can sometimes be a catalyst for social change and justice. Laugh Lines: Cartoons and Caricatures from the Collection, features over 50 works by some of the most important illustrators of the 19th and 20th centuries whose works comment on politics, society and ordinary life. Among the artists represented in the exhibition are Thomas Nast, Edward Gorey, Edward Kemble, Rose O’Neill, Barbara Shermund, Peter Arno, Charles Schulz, Mort Walker and many others.
Annual Exhibition: Illustrators 52
The Museum of American Illustration at the The Society of Illustrators
January 6 through March 20, 2010
The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators presents “Annual Exhibition: Illustrators 52,” a three-part exhibition featuring works from leading contemporary illustrators worldwide. Selected from more than 4,600 submissions by a panel of renowned illustrators and art directors, 417 images of today’s foremost illustrators and animators will be on view in the museum’s galleries in New York.
80/40: Continuing the Celebration and Exploring The Undersea World of Eric Carle
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
September 19 – March 28, 2010
In the second exhibition celebrating Eric Carle’s 80th birthday, life and career, and the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Carle displays a selection of colorful, original illustrations by Eric Carle from his most seaworthy books, and features a rarely seen colossal version of his beloved caterpillar.
Norman Rockwell Museum
January 16 through May 16, 2010
Step back in time to explore Rockwell’s imagery for The Saturday Evening Post, which prompted an outpouring of reader reaction during the artist’s forty-seven year tenure with the magazine. Shifting American values, reform and the New Deal, World War II and the rise of national identity, the Baby Boom and the rise of the middle class, and the politicization of the American populace are some of the themes that will be brought to life in this engaging and informative installation organized by Archivist Jessika Drmacich. Fan correspondence received by Rockwell himself, archival photographs, and the original Saturday Evening Post tearsheets that inspired such lively public response will be on view.
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera
Norman Rockwell Museum
November 7, 2009 - May 31, 2010
Photography has been a benevolent tool for artists from Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas to David Hockney. And to illustrators, always on the lookout for better ways to meet deadlines, the camera has long been a natural ally. But the thousands of photographs Norman Rockwell created as studies for his iconic images are a case apart. A natural storyteller, Rockwell envisioned his narrative scenarios down to the smallest detail. Yet at the easel he was an absolute literalist who rarely painted directly from his imagination.
Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney
Delaware Art Museum
February 6, 2010–May 16, 2010
Inspired by archaeology, lost civilizations, and the art of illustration, Gurney’s Dinotopia is an extraordinary place where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony in a society that has its own language and alphabet (dinosaur footprints that correspond to each letter of the Roman alphabet). Gurney’s stories and art fuse fantasy with realism and scientific accuracy.
Brandywine River Museum
March 20 through May 23, 2010
Myths, fables, fairy tales, and folk tales are usually a child’s first steps into the world of literature, and the illustrations often accompany the text when such stories are published for children stir the imagination and provide entrée to magical worlds. First awarded in 1938, the Caldecott Medal is considered the most prestigious award for children’s illustration. This exhibition will feature the works of selected Caldecott winners from seven decades, including Dorothy Lathrop, David Wiesner, Paul O. Zelinsky, Leo and Diane Dillon, Robert McCloskey, and Maurice Sendak, among many others.
On Assignment: American Illustration 1850 – 1950
Delaware Art Museum
March 6, 2010 – October 10, 2010
Classical literature, romantic best-sellers, cowboy adventures, historical fiction, frothy short stories about high society—all these and many more were the assignment of the working illustrator during a century of profound cultural change. Illustrations captured telling moments of the written narrative, and individual illustrators were often sought out by editors and recognized by readers.
Traveling Shows: Society of Illustrators
“An Historical Look” is a comprehensive exhibition of historical illustration which features fifty original masterworks from the Permanent Collection of the Society of Illustrators Museum of American Illustration. This collection of art spans the 20th Century and demonstrates the changing role of the illustrator. The Society of Illustrators offers two versions of this show; smaller format works and larger format works, to fit the type of exhibit that would be appropriate for you. Please contact us for a detailed list of the artwork included in each show.
Available:
January 2009 – January 2010
Four Week Rental Fee:
$1800 (small format) plus prorated transport
$2,000 (large format) plus prorated transport
Current Bookings:
Large Format: Central Washington University, WASHINGTON: March 16- May 5, 2009
Washington University launches Modern Graphic History Library
Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections will launch the new Modern Graphic History Library with a pair of exhibitions Friday, Nov. 16. (this article ran Nov. 8, 2007 and is repeated here for your information)
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| Al Parker, Mother and Daughter Skiing, 1942. Gouache on board. Collection of Kit and Donna Parker. From the exhibition Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine, 1940-1960. |
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Highlights from the Modern Graphic History Library will open with a reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m. in Olin Library’s Ginkgo Reading Room & Grand Staircase Lobby. A reception for Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine, 1940-1960 will immediately follow, from 7 to 10 p.m. in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
Both exhibitions are free and open to the public. Highlights from the Modern Graphic History Library will remain on view through Jan. 13;Ephemeral Beauty will remain on view through Jan. 28. Olin Library is located on Washington University’s Danforth Campus, just north of the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Tolman Way. The Kemper Art Museum is located a short walk east, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards.
The Modern Graphic History Library is dedicated to acquiring and preserving distinguished works of modern illustration and pictorial graphic culture while also promoting sustained academic consideration of those materials. The collection includes artists’ working materials, sketches and finished artworks — from book, magazine and advertising illustration to graphic novels, comics, poster design, pictorial information design and animation.
The catalyst for establishing the Modern Graphic History Library was a substantial commitment, in 1999, of artwork and studio materials from the family of Al Parker, a St. Louis native and Washington University alumnus who is best known for his groundbreaking post-war illustrations for women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s and Cosmopolitan. Yet the Modern Graphic History Library also draws on a wealth of existing holdings, including strong collections of children’s literature, comics and pulps, periodical illustration, 19th and 20th century political illustration and materials relating to graphic design and the history of printing.
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| Al Parker, Tell Me the Time, 1946. Illustration forTell Me the Time by Marie Fried Rodell, Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1946. Gouache on board. Collection of Kit and Donna Parker. |
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Still, “Kit and Donna Parker were instrumental in developing the Modern Graphic History Library,” said Jeff Pike, the Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman, Jr., Dean and Professor of Art. “The Modern Graphic History Library is now poised to become an invaluable resource for scholars, students and practitioners — those who will find, within the beauty of this unique collection, thoughtful avenues of inquiry for scholarship and inspiration.”
Douglas Dowd, professor of visual communications in the Sam Fox School, drew extensively on university holdings for Ephemeral Beauty, which he organized with Stephanie Plunkett, curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass, where the exhibition debuted last summer.
“Popular art delivers the ultra-now, the super-here,” Dowd notes in a brochure accompanying the Highlights exhibition. “Often, over-exposure or simple datedness follows, and such works are consigned to the garage, literally and figuratively. But later, reconnected with lost contexts and seen afresh, they provide the frisson of frozen history.”
Anne Posega, head of Special Collections, adds that, “We librarians and curators know that scholarship suffers when ephemeral pieces of visual culture are lost or discarded, as so often happens.
“The Modern Graphic History Library will preserve unique contributions to art and society by some of the most significant figures in graphic media, past and present,” Posega continues. “We believe this collection will engender opportunities for intellectual exchange, creative enterprise and education.”
In addition to the exhibitions, the Modern Graphic History Library will sponsor a symposium titled An Art of Aspiration: Periodical Illustration and American Visual Culture from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 17, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.
The event will focus on illustration, cartoons, comics and other images that are not traditionally addressed by art history and require an interdisciplinary approach to appreciate their historical context. Included will be panel discussions on “Anxious Significance: The Culture of Illustration,” and “Periodical Illustration and the Study of American Culture,” as well as talks by Dowd and Wayne Fields, the Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor in English and Director of the American Culture Studies Program in Arts & Sciences.
An Art of Aspiration is free and open to the public but advance registration is required. Steinberg Hall is located immediately adjacent to the Kemper Art Museum. To reserve a seat, call (314) 935-7497 or email samfoxschool@wustl.edu.
Olin Library is open from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays; and 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sundays. To RSVP for the library exhibition opening, call the automated response line – (314) 935-8003 – or visit http://library.wustl.edu. For more information about library exhibition, call the Department of Special Collections at (314) 935-5495, between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
The Kemper Art Museum is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The museum is closed Tuesdays. For more information, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.