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Two New Exhibits and a Conference on Children’s Books at Van Pelt-Dietrich Library |
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September 9, 2014, Volume 61, No. 04 |
As the Ink Flows: Work from the Pen of William Steig is on display through December 19 in the Goldstein Family Gallery, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts on the sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.
As the Ink Flows: Works from the Pen of William Steig, explores the life and career of the artist, cartoonist and children’s book author/illustrator William Steig. The exhibition highlights materials from the recent gift of over 3,000 original drawings, notebooks and scrapbooks, correspondence, books, posters and other materials made by Jeanne Steig, his widow, to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, supplemented with loans from his family.
Pen and ink played a central role in William Steig’s life, from childhood on. Interestingly, for someone who would become an important artist and gifted cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, it was writing, not drawing that was his first creative outlet. The exhibition explores this world of pen and ink, of writing and drawing, to show how intertwined these activities were for William Steig, who became an author as well as an artist. Unlike many artists, who are not great readers, he consumed books, and the ideas they contained. The more one considers the range of his work, the more one can see that his artistry is ultimately informed by language, that is, by ideas that can be thought and written, and then translated into images.
The exhibition will examine the trajectory of his career, from his family background and youth through his cartoons and covers for The New Yorker and other publications, to his books of symbolic drawings and his later work, culminating in his children’s books.
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Richard Egieski, detail of original watercolor and ink illustration for Bravo, Minski (ca. 1988), Atha Tehon Collection. Photo courtesy of Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. |
The School of Atha: Collaboration in the Making of Children’s Books is on display through March 27, 2015 in the Kamin Gallery, on the first floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.
The School of Atha: Collaboration in the Making of Children’s Books, celebrates the life and work of children’s book designer and art director Atha Tehon. The exhibition is based on the collection of her books and papers, including files on books she designed as a freelance book designer, recently given to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by her niece Susan Tehon, supplemented with loans from her family.
After receiving her masters in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania/Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Ms. Tehon began working in book publishing, first at Random House and then as a book designer, art director and associate publisher at Dial Books for Younger Readers, where she worked closely with many of the major artists and authors in the field, including Leo and Diane Dillon, Tom Feelings, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Julius Lester, James Marshall, Jerry Pinkney and Rosemary Wells. Two of the books she designed, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions, both illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, won the Caldecott Medal in 1976 and 1977. At the same time, she continued to do freelance design work for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, working with the children’s book editor Michael di Capua on books by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Richard Egielski, Randall Jarrell, Maurice Sendak, William Steig and Harve and Margot Zemach, among others.
The exhibition will explore her role not only in the creation of so many important children’s books but also in mentoring a new generation of editors and designers in the collaborative process of creating children’s books.
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Detail of original illustration by William Steig, undated. |
The symposium, Creating Children’s Books: Collaboration and Change, will take place in conjunction with two fall exhibitions in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries on Friday, October 17–Saturday, October 18. The first of these exhibitions, As the Ink Flows: Works from the Pen of William Steig, explores the life and career of the artist, cartoonist and children’s book author/illustrator William Steig, while the second, The School of Atha: Collaboration in the Making of Children’s Books, celebrates the life and work of Atha Tehon, children’s book designer and long-standing art director for Dial Books for Young Readers. The symposium is sponsored by the Muriel Pfaelzer Bodek Fund for Library Public Events of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries with additional funding from the Glady Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Creating Children’s Books: Collaboration and Change honors the contributions of these two important figures to the world of children’s literature during late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. It will explore the creation of children’s books from both the writer/illustrator and designer/publisher perspectives, looking at the role of collaboration in the process and considering the future of children’s books from various perspectives, including that of diversity. Atha Tehon worked closely with the renowned editor and publisher Phyllis Fogelman, both of whom championed the work of African-American and Native American authors and illustrators, among others. For registration and booking information visit: www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/childrensbooks_symposium.html |
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Almanac -
September 9, 2014, Volume 61, No. 04
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