Traveling Exhibitions

Norman Rockwell Museum Traveling Exhibitions

The Norman Rockwell Museum has organized for circulation a series of traveling exhibitions that inspire awareness, appreciation, and enjoyment of the art of Norman Rockwell and the ever-vibrant field of illustration. These engaging exhibitions offer a wide range of high-quality installations of original art and related archival materials to museum venues and audiences in diverse geographic locations.

Links to available exhibitions can be found on this page. Please contact us with any questions, we look forward to hearing from you!

Host an Exhibition!

These exhibitions are available to be hosted at your venue.  For more information, please contact TravelingExhibitions@NRM.org.
Laurie Tang: 413-931-2232

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

Norman Rockwell Museum is thrilled to offer an exhibition that’s timely, relevant, and fun! For seventy years, MAD Magazine had its finger on the pulse of politics and culture. As America’s longest-running humor publication, MAD demonstrates the power of visual communication and satire to shape (and sometimes rock) our world. Our Museum’s newest exhibition, What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine, invites audiences to reminisce, discover, reflect on social changes and current events, and LAUGH! One of MAD’s gifts was showing us to ourselves in our extremes and foibles as a culture and society. Amid national and global upheaval, the laughter of self-recognition can be helpful and healing, as well as motivating of needed change. This exhibition is both uniquely appealing and uniquely well-timed to our present cultural moment. We invite you to read more about the MAD exhibition, and all our Museum’s offerings, in the descriptions below. Please note that we are booking MAD tour dates beginning in Winter 2024-25.

BETWEEN WORLDS: The Art and Design of Leo Lionni

A twentieth-century giant of children’s books and modernist aesthetics, Leo Lionni was a maker and bridger of worlds. His work remains valuable for its moral depth, artistic integrity, humanity, and practical idealism. The first major American retrospective of his art and design, organized and presented by Norman Rockwell Museum, showcases what made this consummate creator both extraordinary and deeply relatable. Audiences will delight in the whimsy of his work for children and adults—and take courage from his gentle resistance to unjust social norms.

IMPRINTED: Illustrating Race

Replicated for mass audiences, illustration is at once ubiquitous and hidden in plain sight. Imprinted upon our hearts and minds, often without our realization, published imagery can uplift and can also be deployed to reinforce negative stereotypes and perceptions. Imprinted: Illustrating Race explores historical racial imagery drawn from popular culture and advertising, and celebrates the concerted efforts of twentieth and twenty-first century artists and illustrators to shift the cultural narrative with positive, inclusive imagery emphasizing full agency and equity for all. Imprinted has sparked considerable public interest and dialogue about the ways that art and systems of publishing have helped to frame public opinion, and how art can be a force for change.

Nora Krug: Belonging

Nora Krug: Belonging examines the work of German American illustrator Nora Krug (b. 1977) whose powerful graphic memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, traces the artist’s investigations into the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. The work featured in the exhibition is drawn from Krug’s autobiographical explorations as well as her illustrations for a graphic edition of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, an analysis of the dark history of fascism and America’s current unsettling political climate.

Eloise and More: The Life and Art of Hilary Knight

Best known for his iconic illustrations of Eloise in the books by Kay Thompson, Hilary Knight has been creating art for seven decades. Influenced by his artistic parents, whose work will be on view in this exhibition, Knight’s first drawings were featured in 1952 in magazines such as Gourmet and Mademoiselle. Two years later, he was introduced to actress and singer Kay Thompson. Over the next few years, they collaborated on four books featuring Eloise, the six-year-old girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel.

Jan Brett: Stories Near and Far

With over forty million books in print, Jan Brett is one of the nation’s foremost and most widely read author/illustrators for children. This lively exhibition explores the breadth of Brett’s art and the travel experiences that have inspired her many children’s books and characters. Favorite stories, from Gingerbread Friends, The Umbrella, and Honey…Honey to her most recent published book, Cozy, are represented by more than eighty original artworks, as well as reference materials and selections from the artist’s collection of unique objects and artifacts.

Norman Rockwell’s America: Highlights from the Norman Rockwell Museum

Currently in development, this exhibition drawn from the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum will feature iconic images of American life painted by the most beloved artist and illustrator of the twentieth century. With more than fifty original artworks, including full-scale oil paintings, photographs, drawings, and archival magazines, and tear sheets, the exhibition explores Rockwell’s working methodology and creative process.

Inquiries are invited for availability beginning in 2027.
Please contact travelingexhibitions@nrm.org for more information.