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Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood

October 11, 2024 to January 5, 2025 Jepson Center
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Before televisions, computers, and high-speed internet, everyday Americans engaged with image-based storytelling through illustration. Illustration is art created to be reproduced for books, magazines, periodicals, advertisements, and other printed media. Designed covers—based on finished paintings—by artists like Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) regularly reached thousands of homes via mass-produced publications such as The Saturday Evening Post. Celebrating the charming, wholesome, and seemingly commonplace, Rockwell enjoyed a successful career, which unfolded against a string of era-defining crises and revolutions, including two World Wars, the Great Depression, struggles over Civil Rights, and space exploration. Through illustration, Rockwell and his peers chronicled the transformation and challenging of ideals in the 20th-century, sometimes using childhood to explore complex subject matter. By tapping into American adults’ nostalgia and their associations of childhood with innocence, these artists made subjects from consumer goods to wartime politics more appealing. Through advertisements and calendar illustrations, magazine covers, and story artwork, Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood regards childhood as an expressive and revealing lens to view an evolving and often complex American society.

In partnership with the National Museum of American Illustration (NMAI), based in Newport Rhode Island, Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood will feature over 60 works from NMAI’s collection by key figures in the history of American illustration, including Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966), J.C. Leyendecker (1874–1951), Ethel Franklin Betts (1877–1959), Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935), and N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945).

SUPPORT THIS EXHIBITION

Major funding provided by Bob Faircloth, the Littlejohn Family Foundation, and Linda McWhorter.

Annual Exhibition Support by Director’s Circle Council Members: Anonymous, Mrs. Cynthia Willett, Mr. and Mrs. Charles W. Coker Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Hinnant, Leslie and Angus Littlejohn, Mr. and Mrs. Steven J. Sayer, Mr. and Mrs. Alan Sheriff, Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Bogert, Mrs. Inge A. Brasseler, Kerry and Lillian Breitbart, Leda Chong and Kevin Dewalt, Debbie and Dale Critz, Lila and Dale* Critz, Mr. Robert F. Faircloth, Mr. and Mrs. Ronald J. Gantt, Lindsay and Brent Harlander, Kelley and Josh Keller, Wilson Morris, Mr. and Mrs. J. Herbert Ogden Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Rabinowitz, Thomas V. and Susan G. Reilly, Cathy and Philip Solomons, Pamela L. and Peter S. Voss, Ms. Susan A. Willetts and Mr. Alan K. Pritz

Please contact Lauren Grant at 912.790.8866 or grantl@telfair.org if interested in learning more about supporting this exhibition.

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