A panel of academic and curatorial advisors made up of accomplished scholars, curators, and artists was assembled in April 2021. The advisory has worked with the curators to establish the thesis and framework of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue.

National advisors include: 

Michele H. Bogart, Ph.D.
Michele H. Bogart, Ph.D. was a former Professor of Art History and American visual culture studies at Stony Brook University, where she taught from 1982 to 2020. She is the author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930, recipient of the 1991 Charles C. Eldredge Prize; Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (1995); The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (2006), and Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal in New York (2018). Bogart has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the JFK Institut, Freie Universität von Berlin. From 1999 through 2003, she was Vice President of the Art Commission of the City of New York (renamed the Public Design Commission), the City’s design review agency, and serves on the PDC’s Conservation Advisory Group. From 2017 to 2019, Bogart was a member of the Rockwell Center Society of Fellows, a group of four academic scholars engaged in bringing fresh thinking and enhanced scholarship about published imagery. In 2020, she was awarded the Leon Levy Fellowship at the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick. She is currently an advisor to the Museum’s Terra Foundation Collections Reinterpretation Project.

Heather Campbell Coyle, Ph.D.
Heather Campbell Coyle, Ph.D. is Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum. She pursued doctoral work in art history at the University of Delaware and her dissertation is titled, “Pranks, Performances and Parody in American Art Schools, 1890–1915.” Coyle has organized many exhibitions including Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York, for which she also supervised production of the educational website and catalogue for the project; Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered; and Gertrude Käsebier’s Photographs of the Eight: Portraits for Promotion. She is a Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies Fellow and the editor of Fashion, Circus, Spectacle: Photographs by Scott Heiser. Coyle oversees a collection of American art and illustration spanning 1757 to 1960, and she is currently at work on installations focusing on Jazz Age illustration and on women illustrators.

Karen Fang, Ph.D
Karen Fang, Ph.D. is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston, where her research and teaching interests center upon surveillance, narrative, imperial and postcolonial culture, and comparative global modernities. As a scholar of literature as well as film, she is the author or editor of several studies on Hong Kong and Asian film that explore the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics. Karen is the author of Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film (Stanford University Press 2017), Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes (Routledge, 2017). She also chairs a college initiative in Media and the Moving Image. A Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies Fellow, Fang is conducting research for a book focusing on Chinese American artist and illustrator Tyrus Wong, who was instrumental in the production of the beloved Disney classic, Bambi.

William H. Foster III
William H. Foster III is an emeritus Professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Connecticut. His extensive knowledge of comics has lead him to work with CNN News and National Public Radio as an expert commentator; he has also been a consultant for the Words and Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art in Northampton, Massachusetts and for the Connecticut’s Historical Society on projects relating to African Americans in comics and books. In 2005, Foster compiled his research in Looking for a Face Like Mine, a book published by Fine Tooth Press. In 2007, he was a guest speaker for Central China Normal University’s International Symposium on Langston Hughes, and was featured in PBS’s 2013 documentary, Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle, where he examined the political and social influence of some of his favorite characters. A collector as well, he has lectured internationally on the history of comics and representations of race.

Hollis King
Hollis King is former vice-president and creative director at the Verve Music Group, the largest jazz record label in the world, where he was responsible for art direction of all music packaging, logos, advertising, point-of-purchase displays, and signage at the company. He studied advertising and design at New York City Community College and later transferred to School of Visual Art where he studied with legendary artist Milton Glaser. King worked at several design studios before entering the music industry as a graphic designer at GRP records, later becoming creative director. He then joined the Verve Music Group, a division of Universal Music Company, and worked with some of the greatest musicians of all time. He has received numerous achievement awards and citations as well as five Grammy Nominations. Currently, he leads his own creative company, sits on an executive board, and regularly lectures at Fashion Institute of Technology, School of Visual Arts, Art Directors Club, and Society of Illustrators. He is the catalogue designer for Imprinting a Nation: Illustrating Race.

Theresa Leininger-Miller, Ph.D.
Theresa Leininger-Miller, Ph.D. is Professor of Art History at University of Cincinnati, where she teaches 19th to 21st century American and European art history. Her publications include New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934 (Rutgers, 2001); essays in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, Deborah Grant; Harlem Renaissance; Black Paris; Paris Connections: African American Artists in Paris, Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance;Out of Context: American Artists Abroad; The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, and Picture Cincinnati in Song; and multiple book and exhibition reviews. Leininger-Miller has lectured widely in the United Stated and abroad, and provided expert commentary on radio and television, and in documentaries. The curator of exhibitions at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Yale University Art Gallery, and Weston Art Gallery, she is a Rockwell Center Fellow and the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Kress and Luce Foundations, and the Smithsonian Institution. At the University of Cincinnati, Leininger-Miller received the Diversity Ambassador Award and the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research, among others; she has also served as chair of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Jerry Pinkney* (1939-2021)
Jerry Pinkney (1939-2021); was an award-winning artist who began his creative journey in the field of illustration in 1960. The recipient of a Caldecott Medal, Caldecott Honor Medals, Coretta Scott King Awards, and Coretta Scott King Honor Awards, Pinkney received many commendations for his outstanding body of work, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Illustrators and an Artist Laureate Award from the Norman Rockwell Museum. In addition to his work in children’s books, Pinkney created illustrations for a wide variety of clients, including the U.S. Postal Service, National Park Service, and National Geographic. He served on the U.S. Postal Services Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, and in 2003, was appointed to the National Endowment for the Arts/NEA, a prestigious position held by the artist for six years. A gifted educator, he mentored aspiring illustrators at Pratt Institute, the University of Delaware, and the SUNY Buffalo. The recipient of Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University and the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, he created artworks that are among the collections of The Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Delaware Art Museum, and others. A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech that Inspired a Nation, The Talking Eggs, God Bless the Child, The Old African, John Henry, The Tales of Uncle Remus, and The Lion and the Mouse are among his many illustrated books. His art traveled nationally in Witness: The Art of Jerry Pinkney and Jerry Pinkney: Imaginings, two exhibitions organized by Norman Rockwell Museum.*

James Ransome
James Ransome is an award-winning illustrator and emeritus Professor of Illustration at Syracuse University. The Children’s Book Council named Ransome one of 75 authors and illustrators everyone should know. He has received both the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Honor Award for The Creation, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Award for Uncle Jed’s Barbershop, an ALA Notable book featured on Reading Rainbow. How Many Stars in the Sky? and Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt were also Reading Rainbow selections, and The Old Dog appeared on PBS’s Storytime. Ransome was the recipient of The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance award for The Wagon; Let My People Go was awarded the NAACP Image Award for Illustration; and Satchel Paige was designated a best children’s book by Bank Street College of Education; among many other honors. Freedom Rang, Before She Was Harriet, The Bell Rang, Just a Lucky So and So: The Story of Louis Armstrong, Light in the Darkness, How Animals Saved the People, Visiting Day, Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass, and Freedom’s School are among his many illustrated books. Ransome has completed commissioned murals for the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis; The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati; and the Hemphill Branch Library in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ph.D.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Ph.D. is a Professor and Chair of English at Pomona College. For 20 years, she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English. Her research is primarily focused on Black female representation in mid-19th to early 20^th-American literature and visual culture.  She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers UP, 2007), an interdisciplinary study of representations of the “New Negro” woman as a mixed-race icon in the literary and visual culture of the Harlem Renaissance and Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color, (Rutgers UP, 2012, a 2013 BCALA honor book. She is the editor of A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Wiley 2015), and her current scholarly projects include editing the Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature. She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including a Kellett Mid-Career Award (UW-Madison), National Endowment for the Humanities Award, and 2019 Outstanding Women of Color Award. Her essay “A Plea for Color: Nella Larsen’s Mulatta Iconography” (2004) was awarded the Foerster prize for best essay published in American literature. Grimoire was a New York Public Library’s Top Ten Poetry Books of 2020.

Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Ph.D.
Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Ph.D. is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is expanding the museum’s collections in architecture and design. She co-curated two inaugural NMAAHC exhibitions: A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture and A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond. In 2018, she served as lead organizer for the museum’s three-day symposium, “Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now.” Prior to NMAAHC, Wilkinson spent six years as director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. She has also worked at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in 2012, she completed a short-term residency at the Design Museum in London. She has presented her research on architectural heritage in the Anglophone Caribbean has been presented to international audiences in Suriname, England, India, and the United States. Wilkinson’s most recent efforts explore issues of representation in architectural renderings.

*Jerry Pinkney participated in the committee until his death in October of 2021. The exhibition and catalogue will be dedicated in his honor and in celebration of his legacy as a master of American illustration.