Announcing the 2024 Hall of Fame Recipients:
Steve Brodner, Greg Manchess, Yuko Shimizu, Gustave Doré,
Robert Grossman, Virginia Frances Sterrett

Since 1958, the Society of Illustrators has elected to its Hall of Fame artists recognized for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration.” Artists are elected by a prestigious committee that includes former presidents of the Society and illustration historians. They are chosen based on their body of work and the impact it has made on the field of illustration. This year’s honorees include contemporary illustrators Steve Brodner, Greg Manchess, and Yuko Shimizu, as well as posthumous honorees Gustave Doré, Robert Grossman, and Virginia Frances Sterrett. These artists join a list of the greatest names in illustration!

The Society will be honoring this year’s inductees at The Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony to be held on Thursday, September 26th, 2024. Details and tickets for the formal ceremony will be announced in the next few months.

Steve Brodner has been a leading satiric artist for the last 40 years. His goal during this time was to find a home for various forms of political and social commentary in the world of independent, freelance art. His work has appeared in most major publications in the US. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The NY Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and GQ, among others. His work currently appears regularly in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Nation. He has covered over 50 stories as a journalist, including 16 national political conventions, the US farm crisis, a profile of life along the Mexican border, guns in Philadelphia, and climbing Mt. Fuji. In addition, Brodner’s The Naked Campaign, his 32 short films documenting the 2008 presidential campaign, was featured on NewYorker.com. Also in 2008, Brodner was the subject of a major career retrospective, “Raw Nerve” (the first for a living artist) at the Norman Rockwell Museum. He has won many major awards in the graphic arts, including medals at the Society of Illustrators, Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, SPD, the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College, the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union, and the Masters Series Award from the School of Visual Arts.  His work currently appears daily at stevebrodner.substack.com and weekly in thenation.com. His career retrospective: Freedom Fries (2004) and the story of the Covid years in the US, Living and Dying in America (2022), were both published by Fantagraphics Books. He is an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

(Art credit: Steve Brodner, The Court of Donald I, The Los Angeles Times, January 2017. Watercolor.)

The award-winning painter Gregory Manchess’ work has appeared on covers and feature stories for National Geographic Magazine, Time, Atlantic Monthly, and The Smithsonian. His figure and portrait work has led to numerous commissions for stamps by the US Postal Service, including stamps celebrating Oregon Statehood, Mark Twain, and The 1963 March On Washington. Manchess’s commissioned work has been displayed prominently in many blockbuster exhibits. The National Geographic Society commissioned Manchess to create art for their traveling exhibit Real Pirates: The Untold Story of The Whydah, from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship. His large-scale portrait of Abraham Lincoln, along with seven major paintings of key moments from Lincoln’s life, are highlighted in the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Manchess’s illustrations appear frequently in books, including his self-written and illustrated “widescreen novel” Above the Timberline, released in 2017 to stellar reviews. Thirty of the over one hundred twenty paintings from the book were featured in an exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts. He recently finished twenty-one paintings for a special limited edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for Lyra’s Books in the UK. His film and television work includes six paintings showcased in the movie The Ballard of Buster Scruggs by The Coen Brothers. Widely awarded within the industry, he regularly exhibits at the Society of Illustrators in New York. In 1999, his peers at the Society presented him with their highest honor, the coveted Hamilton King Award, and later, the Stevan Dohanos Award. Manchess is included in Walt Reed’s edition of The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000. Today, Manchess lectures at universities and colleges nationwide and gives workshops in painting at the Norman Rockwell Museum and The Atelier in Minneapolis. He teaches at the Illustration Master Class and online with SmArt School.

(Art credit: Gregory Manchess, Dorothy, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Lyra’s Classics | Lyra’s Books, Shropshire, UK. 2024. Oil on canvas.)

YUKO SHIMIZU (清水裕子) is a multi-award-winning Japanese illustrator based in New York City. Shimizu is also an instructor at The School of Visual Arts and has over twenty years of experience illustrating. Her work includes multiple disciplines; from pages of The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, and The New Yorker to WIRED,  covers for DC Comic, Penguin, and Scholastic, and advertising for BBC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Universal Pictures, SONY, Paramount, MTV, Nike, Hasbro, and Target, to name a few. Additionally, she has collaborated with the Smithsonian Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Library of Congress. In 2020, collaboration with Artechouse brought her drawings to large-scale interactive experiences. Yuko is a two-time Hugo Award nominee (2019, 2020), has earned multiple Clio Awards (2023), and has won more than fifteen medals from the Society of Illustrators since 2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Caldecott Honor, one of the highest awards for picture books, for her work on the children’s book The Cat Man of Aleppo (Penguin, 2020). Shimizu was also chosen as one of the “100 Japanese People the World Respects (世界が尊敬する日本人１００” by Newsweek Japan in 2009. Shimizu has been a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) since 2023.

(Art credit: Yuko Shimizu, Madame Butterfly On Her Own Terms. Cincinnati Magazine, July 7, 2023.
Pen and ink, digital.)

Gustave Doré’s (1832 – 1883) long career began at an early age, when at only 15 years, he became a caricaturist for the French paper Le journal pour rire. This was followed with several text comics including Les Travaux d’Hercule (1847), Trois artistes incompris et mécontents (1851), Les Dés-agréments d’un voyage d’agrément (1851) and L’Histoire de la Sainte Russie (1854). During the 1860s, Doré was commissioned to create over two hundred engraved illustrations for Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Doré’s detailed depictions of the humorous characters, elaborate landscapes, and historically accurate costumes continue to influence film adaptations, theater productions, and artists to this day. Around this time, Doré completed a series of wood engravings for an illustrated Bible. Volumes were published simultaneously in France and the UK. Additionally, Doré’s work would be featured in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, The Works of Thomas Hood, and The Divine Comedy, as well as the book London: A Pilgrimage.

(Art credit: Gustave Doré, “A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination”. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part 1, Chapter 1, Plate 1, 1863. Wood-engraving.)

Award-winning artist Robert Grossman’s (1940 – 2018) career spanned nearly 60 years. He grew up in Brooklyn, NY, attended Yale University, and after a stint at The New Yorker, embarked on a trailblazing career. Employing his signature airbrush style, he went on to illustrate over 500 magazine covers alone. National publications that featured Grossman’s distinctive, whimsical, and satirical caricatures, cartoons, illustrations, and sculptures include Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Nation, Esquire, New York Magazine, Mother Jones, National Lampoon, The New York Observer, The Atlantic, The Realist, Forbes, and many others. Grossman also illustrated numerous album covers, book jackets, and movie posters. including the iconic poster for the film AIRPLANE!. In the 1970s, he was a contributing editor at New York Magazine, and at the end of the decade, he began a successful career as an animator. His short animated film Jimmy the C received an Academy Award nomination, and he produced several Television commercials in the 1980s. As an author, Grossman’s 1975 children’s book What Can a Hippopotamus Be? is still widely read in Japan, and his epic illustrated novel, Lite on the Moon was nominated for an Eisner Award some four decades later. His artwork has been widely exhibited, including a solo show in Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. His work has been both critically acclaimed and widely influential. In his own words, Grossman said he liked to “illustrate the un-illustratable”, and found the process of drawing “endlessly magical”. The idea that there are “an infinite number of little worlds waiting to be created on a piece of paper” forever excited him, as much in his final years as when he was a child.

(Art credit: Robert Grossman, Airplane! Paramount Pictures, 1980. Air-brush.)

Illustrator and artist Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900 – 1931) had a short but productive and influential career. From an early age, Sterrett showed incredible creative talents, but as a teenager, Sterrett became the sole provider of her family and was unable to complete her studies at The Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 19, Sterrett completed commissions for  Penn Publishing Company, including Comtesse de Ségur’s Old French Fairy Tales and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. It was around this time that Sterrett developed tuberculosis, greatly affecting her ability to create work. She was only able to complete one additional project, her interpretation and most popular work, Arabian Nights.

(Art credit: Virginia Francess Sterrett, “They walked side by side.” Old French Tales, Penn Publishing Company, 1920.)