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Artist vs. Author: Exhibit and Sale by Illustration House
September 8, 2022 - October 22, 2022
Why “versus” ? Aren’t the artist and author on the same creative team? For every case like F. Scott Fitzgerald gushing that Henry Raleigh’s drawings are “the best I’ve ever seen”, we have also seen the author’s cherished visual concepts complicated by the illustrator, who may alter a story’s point of view, elevate a character, or provide missing settings and costumes.
The illustrator is drawing upon a different vocabulary, a different history, a different culture. Any synergy is missed when an image-less edition is published. Then again, is the clarity that illustration brings even wanted? J. D. Salinger famously resisted all attempts to illustrate him.
This relationship between the co-creators of magazine and book entertainment is rarely explored in exhibitions, as often the art and literature worlds ignore each other. In this exhibit and sale, we see dozens of these relationships, from William Shakespeare as seen by Arthur Keller, to Toni Morrison as seen by Thomas Blackshear II, to Arthur Conan Doyle as seen by Sergio Martinez — and from comedy to fantasy to westerns to mystery. Artists and authors alike range from the famous to the obscure.
Curator of “Artist vs Author” Roger Reed, explores this interface, to bring the viewer back to the original marriage, for better or worse, of image and text.
