An exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum explores race and identity over more than a century of illustration.
The exhibit, Imprinted: Illustrating Race, shows how race was presented - and evolved - over the decades in books, magazines, and other pop cultural artifacts. The museum’s curator of American Art, Heather Campbell Coyle, says Imprinted incorporates a lot of different styles and objects.
“By illustration, I mean work that was made largely for books and magazines, but also for advertising, trade cards, posters, just popular culture items. It even has a cookie jar in it", she says.
The exhibition was sparked by the lived experience of one of its co-curators, Univ. of Delaware Professor Robyn Phillips-Pendleton.
“Robyn started the research really in about 2014," Coyle says. "As a working illustrator and professor of visual communication, she was very aware that when she was growing up, she wasn't really seeing images in the popular press that looked like her as a Black woman.”
One famous artist in the show is Norman Rockwell, known for his predominantly-white family scenes in the Saturday Evening Post. Coyle says Rockwell changed course in the 1950s, focusing more socially-relevant topics like civil rights and human rights.
“He stops working for the Post after 47 years and then begins to work for places that are going to put out the stories that he's interested in telling," she says.
Imprinted: Illustrating Race is on display through March 1 at the Delaware Art Museum.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
