The unassuming, yet internationally renowned and award-winning, sketch artist Anita Kunz brought a group of 12 media folk on a special tour through her current exhibit “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage” at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA. Leading the group and answering questions along with Kunz were two staff representatives from NRM.
She’s the first woman, and the first Canadian, to present a solo exhibit of her work at the Library of Congress, and two of her paintings can be found at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. You’d recognize Anita Kunz’s often satirical works from the covers of Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone and the New York Times magazines as well the designs on more than 50 book jackets.
When you find them on the walls, you’ll find out that Buffalo Calf Road Woman is the Northern Cheyenne "who has become known as Custer’s final foe” or that Goddard, a victim’s rights activist, is the inventor of the rape kit. You can learn that Smith was the illustrator of the most recognized tarot card deck in the world and that Johnson was a Black transgender woman was one of the most prominent figures of the gay rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City.
Anita Kunz has made a career of drawing famous people: presidents and other world leaders for the covers of the New Yorker, Variety and Time…, and rap and rock stars for Rolling Stone. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. For the past four years, however, she’s focused less on portraying VIPs and more on depicting subjects and stories unfamiliar to many or even most of us.
Stockbridge — Portraits of historically famous women, as well as some less well known, are all part of the exhibit “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage” on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum. The exhibit opened earlier this month and will be on display until May 26. Toronto native Anita Kunz created these portraits during lockdown amidst the COVID pandemic.
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.
Norman Rockwell Museum is the first American museum, and just the third venue worldwide, to present original portraits from Kunz’s Original Sister series. Approximately 240 Sister portraits will be on view at the Museum, accompanied by brief written profiles compiled by the artist.
History pop quiz: Can you name the leader of the largest pirate fleet in history? Who was the first person to fly solo, non-stop, from England to North America, a more difficult trip than Charles Lindbergh’s eastbound flight? What about the youngest playwright to win a New York Drama Critics’ Circle award, or the author of the first English language autobiography? The feats themselves may be entirely unknown to you, and the commonality between each may surprise you: All of these individuals were women. No, it isn’t Women’s History Month. Not yet...
