The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, has become a popular destination in the Berkshires for its spacious galleries filled with Rockwell art and lore, as well as its significant archive of American illustration and a burgeoning legacy of original contemporary exhibitions. Just coming off its well-attended show on the art and culture of MAD magazine, the current offering, Anita Kunz: Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, is a tour de face and force of research and artistry that defies the false equivalency between fine and applied art, insofar as the artistry is flawless and the application is mind- and eye-grabbing.
Kunz has long deserved the distinction of leader and master as a conceptual (satiric and editorial) artist/illustrator. With this latest exhibition and the book on which it is based, she has become elevated into a higher realm of both intellectual and expressive power. Visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum’s galleries, seeing the precise rows of over 200 of her forgotten “Original Sisters,” one will doubtless be rendered speechless by the beauty, gravity, intelligence and passion in each of these works.
The selection of who (and who not) to include in this show must have been excruciating. The temptation to ask “where is so and so” is mitigated, however, by the exhaustive number of women featured, each with an accompanying biography.
At the opening ceremony, Kunz, who was moved to make this array of “self-motivated” art during COVID lockdown, told the packed-in attendees that her goal was to do one picture a day. This not only implied sketching and painting (which she demonstrates in a sped-up process video), but writing the bios of the known and long unknown women, representing a broad spectrum from celebrities to clerics, from saints to sinners, from dead and living and all those figures that history, legend and lore have misplaced.
If there is a bias of any kind, it was lost on me. Kunz’s decision to forego the caricature element that she is best known for in favor of representative portraiture fills the air with respect for everyone she’s selected. The only editorializing that I saw was in the eyes of her subjects—some were looking forward, others looking askance and a few avoiding direct contact with the viewer altogether. An additional editorial feature—of consequence to designers—as Chip Kidd, editor of the book, noted during the brief live conversation moderated by curator Jane Dini, was the extraordinary variety of lettering used to spell out the names. A couple of them resemble script signatures, but the majority reveal a truly impressive reservoir of talent for typefaces of all shapes, sizes and styles.
Kunz explained that she was set to title the book Originals, but Kidd suggested Original Sisters would have more resonance. And resonance it has, as a document of achievement over time.
One room referencing Kunz’s political satire and other caricature she’s done for a wide array of causes and publications is an impressive introduction or coda (depending on one’s orientation upon entering the galleries) that displays the soul and spirit of an artist who has devoted her vast painting talent to more than simple illumination of a writer’s message. She is not the messenger but the visualizer of ideas and ideals she holds dear.
It is a tribute to Rockwell, who was known for mythologizing the commonplace USA, as well as calling out its racial strife and social foibles. The show is currently on view through May 26.