The Delaware Art Museum presents Imprinted: Illustrating Race

Imprinted is an impressive exhibition, monumental in size as well as in scope, aims, and achievement. It posits (and shows) that illustration has been at the forefront of defining American events, from the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s Civil Rights movement to the present day. It explores, illuminates, and clarifies the role of published images in “both shaping and reflecting [our] attitudes toward race and culture over three centuries.”

Norman Rockwell and the Civil Rights movement

The exhibition’s impetus was the powerful imagery supporting the Civil Rights movement created by Norman Rockwell, an artist well aware of illustration’s powers of persuasion. Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, it was ably co-curated by illustrator/educator Robyn Phillips-Pendleton (of the University of Delaware and Maryland Institute College of Art) and Stephanie Haboush Plunkett (the Rockwell’s chief curator).

Imprinted goes both back and forward from Rockwell’s lifetime (1894-1978), an ambitious historical survey of American illustration that includes advertising and scores of artists ranging from Howard Pyle (1853-1911) and earlier through the present day. Images that many Americans grew up with—like Aunt Jemima or Cream of Wheat—are here refocused and reframed.

A careful chronology

Some exhibitions can be viewed in any order, but here it’s best to follow the curators’ carefully crafted chronology. Titles of the exhibition’s 10 sections are themselves a history of illustration. Works are arranged by Native American and Black Images in the Illustrated Press; Persuasion in Print; Racial Divides in Literature; Minstrel Shows and the Evolving Image of Black People; Racial Imagery in Advertising; Illustrating the Harlem Renaissance; Illustration and Race in 20th Century Magazines; The Civil Rights Movement; Freedom’s Visual Language; and Illustration, Race and Responsibility Today.

This was a monumental undertaking. I counted 161 framed works on the walls, and there are scores of additional ephemerals and publications in vitrines throughout the expansive gallery. But if all this sounds didactic or daunting, Imprinted is absolutely the opposite. It is fascinating and eye-opening and filled with arresting works.

The beauty of diversity

One of the exhibition’s central images is Rockwell’s powerful Murder in Mississippi (1965), created for Look magazine as the final illustration for Southern Justice by Charles Morgan, Jr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1993), created by Emory Douglas as the cover illustration for the Sun-Reporter, surrounds the great civil-rights leader with shining rays of light. And Chris Hopkins’s majestic Flyer of the 332^nd Fighter Group Standing Beside His P-51 (2012) is from his Tuskegee Airmen series.

There are powerful overt political statements, like those, but many images in Imprinted impart their message in subtler, often celebratory ways. Two works by Rudy Gutierrez – Trane and the show’s signature image Spirit Flight (both 2012) – channel the great jazz musician John Coltrane. There are two 1991 illustrations by Jerry Pinkney (1939-2021) created for Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Phillips-Pendleton’s three luminous oils from Homework for Breakfast (text by Delaware’s Twin Poets) and Today I Saw a Bird Outside My Window (2017) by Shadra Strickland are only two notable illustrations, along with memorable works by Romare Bearden, Emory Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, and Pyle.

Like the work of several other well-known American artists, some Rockwell images have recently been used (without authorization) by the Department of Homeland Security to illustrate an idealized “white” America. But Rockwell’s oeuvre included people of all races and colors in his prolific body of more than 4,000 illustrations, and (especially apt at this time) celebrating the beauty of diversity is a hallmark of Imprinted.

Stunning in scope

The exhibition design is straightforward and approachable, guiding the viewer’s focus to the artworks. Physically preparing this was a massive task, and so kudos also go to the registrars who catalogued these works and the preparators who framed and mounted everything, as well as to the two remarkable curators.

After it closes here, the exhibition travels to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Imprinted’s national organizing council included illustrators as well as scholars like DelArt’s American art curator Heather Campbell Coyle, whose article is featured in the accompanying expansive publication. Through its run, there are extensive programs amplifying the exhibition, and in a gallery reading corner are some of the books featured on the walls.

Some exhibitions are stunning because of the artworks. But this one is also stunning in its scope and in the detail with which it assails and assays its ambitious and sensitive subject. There are many ways that this could have diverged or been sidetracked, but Imprinted: Illustrating Race remains admirably true to its scope and title. It dives deeply, fearlessly, and powerfully into a potentially divisive subject, treating it with both rigor and sensitivity, and allowing its chosen artworks and their creators to speak clearly and forcefully.