Creating Children's Books Symposium

As the Ink Flows: Works from the Pen of William Steig, explores the life and career of the artist, cartoonist, and children's book author/illustrator William Steig. The exhibition highlights materials from the recent gift of over 2,500 original drawings, notebooks and scrapbooks, correspondence, books, posters, and other materials made by Jeanne Steig, his widow, to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, supplemented with loans from his family.

Pen and ink played a central role in William Steig's life, from childhood on. Interestingly, for someone who would become an important artist and gifted cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, it was writing, not drawing that was his first creative outlet. The exhibition explores this world of pen and ink, of writing and drawing, to show how intertwined these activities were for William Steig, who became an author as well as an artist. Unlike many artists, who are not great readers, Steig consumed books, and the ideas they contained. The more one considers the range of his work, the more one can see that his artistry is ultimately informed by language, that is, by ideas that can be thought and written, and then translated into images.

The exhibition will examine the trajectory of Steig's career, from his family background and youth through his cartoons and covers for The New Yorker and other publications, to his books of symbolic drawings and his later work, culminating in his children's books.
 

The School of Atha: Collaboration in the Making of Children's Books, celebrates the life and work of children's book designer and art director Atha Tehon. The exhibition is based on the collection of her books and papers, including files on books she designed as a freelance book designer, recently given to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by her niece Susan Tehon, supplemented with loans from her family.

After receiving her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania / Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Tehon began working in book publishing, first at Random House and then as a book designer, art director, and associate publisher at Dial Books for Younger Readers, where she worked closely with many of the major artists and authors in the field, including Leo and Diane Dillon, Tom Feelings, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Julius Lester, James Marshall, Jerry Pinkney, and Rosemary Wells. Two of the books she designed, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears and Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions, both illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, won the Caldecott Medal in 1976 and 1977. At the same time, she continued to do freelance design work for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, working with the children's book editor Michael di Capua on books by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Richard Egielski, Randall Jarrell, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, and Harve and Margot Zemach, among others.

The exhibition will explore her role not only in the creation of so many important children's books but also in mentoring a new generation of editors and designers in the collaborative process of creating children's books.

Image: Richard Egieski, detail of original watercolor and ink illustration for Bravo, Minski (ca. 1988), Atha Tehon Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.