Visualizing Modernity: Jazz Age Illustration in America

Heather Campbell Coyle, Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum, will explore Jazz Age Illustration, the first exhibition to survey the art of American illustration in the 1920s and ’30s. Dr. Coyle will explore how jazz music invented by African American musicians and appropriated by White musicians became the soundtrack and metaphor of a vibrant era marked by dramatic cultural change and the expansion of the popular press. In magazines, newspapers, books, posters, and sheet music, illustrators recorded the rise of jazz musicians, flappers, and film stars, and their works were seen by millions of Americans each month. Increased demand for illustration opened the field to more women and African American artists, and publishers embraced a range of styles from the realism of Norman Rockwell to the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural expression of Black identity and Art Deco design.

$10 plus admission; Free for Members, Reservations required