The Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies

September 10, 2011 – March 20, 2012

Come see the original art from Eric Carle’s new book: The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse. Executed in his signature colorfully-designed collage technique, the book encourages the young artist to let his/her imagination run free.

 

December 3, 2011 – May 6, 2012

 

Testing the Ice by Sharon Robinson, an educational consultant for Major League Baseball and vice chairman of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and illustrated by the award-winning Kadir Nelson is a story about her father, baseball legend Jackie Robinson. On April 15, 1947, Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers and became the first African-American man to play in major league baseball. In 1962, he became the first African-American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But this is not that story. Daughter Sharon Robinson’s story is about an incident that happened in her family after her father retired from baseball.

 

Delaware Art Museum
November 12, 2011 – March 4, 2012

In celebration of the  centenary of the death of the American artist and illustrator Howard Pyle (1853  – 1911), the Delaware Art Museum is presenting a comprehensive retrospective  exhibition.  Pyle was one of America’s  most popular illustrators and storytellers during a period of explosive growth  in the publishing industry.  His  illustrations appeared in magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Collier’s Weekly,  St. Nicholas, and Scribner’s Magazine, gaining him national and even  international exposure.  The appeal of his imagery made him a celebrity in  his lifetime, and Pyle’s widely circulated pictures of knights, pirates, and  historical figures influenced depictions of these subjects for  generations.  This exhibition presents a  fresh perspective on Pyle’s familiar images, by exploring his interaction with the  art and culture of his time – effectively re-positioning him within the broader  spectrum of 19th-century art.

The Delaware Art Museum was originally founded  in 1912 to preserve and exhibit the art of Howard Pyle following his untimely  death in November 1911.  Howard Pyle:   American Master Rediscovered will serve to begin a celebration of the  Delaware Art Museum’s first 100 years (1912 – 2012).

 

 

We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball

The Eric Carl Museum of Picture Book Art

February 7 – June 10, 2012  

“We are the ship; all else the sea.” Rube Foster, founder of the Negro National League Learn about history through these thirty-three paintings, thirteen sketches and educational materials from the book, WE ARE THE SHIP: The Story of Negro League Baseball, by Kadir Nelson, award-winning artist and author. Nelson spent seven years researching, writing, and creating handsome paintings to be included in the brilliantly illustrated book, WE ARE THE SHIP: The Story of Negro League Baseball, which is dedicated to the preservation of the history of Negro Leagues.  

 

Here’s Looking at You Kid

The Society of Illustrators

January 31, 2012 through March 31, 2012

Until the mid-20th century, American illustrators portrayed children as wholesome, often funny, always innocent. Taking up the theme were some of America’s most preeminent illustrators, among them William Glackens, whose “Guess Who, Grandpa” is unreservedly coy, Reginald Birch, of Little Lord Fauntleroy fame, whose frenetic park scene captures the thrum of city life, and F.R. Gruger, whose intimate city scene is rendered with great sensitivity.

Women illustrators, who often were hired by periodicals when the subject was children, included Katherine Sturges Knight (mother of Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight), and Maud Hunt Squire, whose images are reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks.  Kids were also used not only as editorial fodder, but also to sell the new, mass-produced cereals, most memorably in the Cream of Wheat campaigns featuring healthy well-fed tots. Other upstanding kids can be seen in J.C. Leyendecker’s Boy Scout selling WWI war bonds, and John Falter’s boy at prayer for Reader’s Digest.

Then there are the naughty kids: A.B. Frost’s hilarious deadpan girl in “I Think There’s Something the Matter With Pop,” or Robert Hilbert’s would-be Indian caught using his mother’s makeup. And of course, Norman Rockwell’s Huck Finn, the bad boy of all bad boys.  By the 1960s, naiveté made room for darker themes as in Lorraine Fox’s young Sherlock, or Jerry Pinkney’s Holy Armor, in which two girls are drawn to devils and demons. For McCall’s, Herb Tauss captures the discomfort a young girl feels about her older brother’s romance, as the kids—along with the rest of the country—lose some of their innocence.

 

Illustrators 54: Advertising and Institutional

The Society of Illustrators

February 23, 2012 through March 17, 2012

The third of the three-part “Annual Exhibition: Illustrators 54,” the Advertising and Institutional Exhibit will be held at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators February 23 to March 17, 2012. It featured works by leading contemporary illustrators worldwide, selected by a prestigious jury of professionals.

Advertising illustration includes work for advertisements appearing in newspapers, magazines or on television; video and CD covers; brochures, fashion, point-of-purchase and packaging illustration; movie and theater posters.  Gold Medal winners include Gérard DuBois for his illustration Giant Milk Brick (AD Mélanie Baillairgé, BBDO Montreal), Leslie Herman for The World That Haunts the Clock Tower (AD Malia Hall, Okervil River), and Alessandro Gottardo for Waiting (Daniel Moorey, Volkswagen).  Silver Medals are awarded to Jonathan Bartlett for Greenland (AD Dustin Olson, The Bridge Theatre Company), Rod Hunt for his illustration Welcome to the World of Sex (AD Spencer Riviera, Goodby Silverstein & Partners), and Bill Mayer’s Creative Carnival (AD Alison Curry, Workbook). 

Institutional illustration includes work appearing on merchandise, announcements, annual reports, calendars, corporate projects, government service projects, greeting cards, newsletters, in-house publications, philatelic work and collectibles.  Gold Medal winners include Marcos Chin for his illustration Textile (Stephanie Pesakoff), Emiliano Ponzi for Evil Apple Core (EMI Music), and Jillian Tamaki for 16th Annual Croquet Ball (AD Cramer-Krasselt, Penfield Children’s Center).  Silver Medal winners include Sam Bosma for Frog Kaiju (AD Jim Burke, Dellas Graphics), Bill Carman for Translator (AD Heidi Leigh, Animazing Gallery), Brian Stauffer for Digital Evidence and the Smoking Gun (AD Winnie Hume, Emory Law),

 

Comic Catharsis:

A Gift of Cartoons by William Steig

Currier & Ives: Impressions of America will contain approximately twenty of Currier & Ives’ most iconic and highly-prized prints from the private collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly and will be featured in the Museum’s Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Gallery. Kelly, a Danbury oral surgeon, lives in West Redding, Connecticut.

Frequently referred to as the “Printers for the People,” Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives took advantage of what was then the newly-invented process of lithography to make ownership of full-color images possible for the general public. Imported to the United State in the 1820s from Bavaria, lithography allowed for a quick and relatively cheap production of prints using limestone as the printing surface. With over 7,500 different images in existence, Currier & Ives lithographs accounted for three-quarters of the American print market. Capturing a wide array of themes—from daily news to homely genre scenes—they became some of the most popular and recognizable representations of life and times in America.

opens January 7, 2012

“My experience on Boys’ Life helped me build some confidence in myself at a time when I needed courage, needed to believe in myself.”
—Norman Rockwell

At the age of nineteen, Norman Rockwell was appointed art editor of Boys’ Life magazine. Over the course of sixty-four years, the artist produced numerous Scouting illustrations for use on calendars, magazines, handbooks, and posters. Part of a long tradition of artists who helped to shape and define the image of the Boy Scouts of America, Rockwell imbued his Scouting subjects with a sense of higher purpose inspired by the organization’s principles and practice.

For more than a century, the Boy Scouts have relied on illustrators to translate Scouting life into striking visual narratives. Featuring the work of Norman Rockwell, Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Walt Disney Studios, Howard Chandler Christy, Dean Cornwell, and Joseph Csatari, this new permanent installation takes a closer look at the artists behind America’s largest youth organization.

 

February 18, 2012-September 9, 2012

Katharine Pyle (1863-1938), Howard Pyle’s youngest sibling, emerged as one of Delaware’s most prolific women authors and illustrators. Between 1898 and 1934, she published over 50 books – many of them stories about folk, fairies, animals, and children’s tales. This exhibition serves to reintroduce the works of Katharine Pyle to present-day audiences.

March 10, 2012 through June 10, 2012

 

Highly-regarded as a prominent American portraitist, Everett Raymond Kinstler began his career as a comic book artist and illustrator
working for the popular publications of his day. The artist’s original illustrations and portraits of noted celebrities—from John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, Tony Bennett, and Tom Wolfe to artists James Montgomery Flagg, Alexander Calder, and Will Barnett will be on view in a lively installation that explores the process of capturing likenesses of his subjects for posterity. The Norman Rockwell Museum Distinguished Illustrator Series honors the unique contributions of outstanding visual communicators today. Presented by the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, the nation’s first research institute devoted to the art of illustration, the Distinguished Illustrator Series reflects the impact and evolution of Norman Rockwell’s beloved profession, exploring a diverse and ever-changing field.

 

October 6, 2012-January 6, 2013

 

After studying with Howard Pyle, Katharine Richardson Wireman (1878-1966) began her career as an illustrator of articles and stories for adults and children, advertisements, and fashion features. Especially known for a number of lively color covers for The Country Gentleman from 1916 to 1924, Wireman ably adapted her versatile style to a variety of subjects through the mid-twentieth century. This exhibition will also include a selection of works by other women illustrators of the period, providing a context for Wireman’s art.

 

Delaware Art Museum

February 9, 2013 – June 1, 2013

This exhibition explores how contemporary illustrators of many styles are excited and inspired by Howard Pyle’s art. While some of these works bear clear visual similarity to Pyle, others reflect his influence in less obvious ways. A range of media will be included in this exciting exhibition

 

Although AAS has no physical exhibition spaces, it has created several online   exhibitions in recent years. Check out http://www.chavic.org/Exhibitions.htm for various online vitual exhibitions.