NEWS

Nestled the rolling hills of rural Massachusetts, swathed by manicured grounds, sits the Norman Rockwell Museum. And there, side-by-side with the wholesome works of America's most beloved illustrator, is the world's dumbest cover boy: Alfred E. Neuman. "It's sacrilegious! It's an outrage!" laughed political cartoonist Steve Brodner. "But I do think if Norman Rockwell were here, he'd laugh his head off. He'd think this was fantastic." These hallowed halls are now home to the world's largest exhibit of artwork from Mad Magazine, co-curated by Brodner. "I was formed by Mad," he said. "My idea of comedy, humor, irreverent drawing comes from this."

“Every country used poster art historically to motivate engagement in one way or another,” says Laurie Norton-Moffat, CEO/executive director of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As get-out-the-vote activity is reaching fever pitch, the Norman Rockwell Museum has launched the Unity Project 2024, a digital campaign using the power of illustration to foster civic engagement and participation through art.

STOCKBRIDGE, MA – September 17 – In March 1976, a great American portrait debuted to an adoring public. It was a bicentennial appreciation of George Washington … of a sort. Inspired by The Athenaeum Portrait, Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 painting featured on the one-dollar bill, this rendering of the first president featured one distinction. The original showed Washington with swollen, tightly closed lips due to a new set of ill- fitting dentures, while the 1976 version had a gap-toothed smirk instantly recognizable to America’s middle school reprobates. Equally recognizable was the blank stare that those same kids knew evoked the iconic question: “What, Me Worry?”

STOCKBRIDGE, MA — September 5, 2024– Norman Rockwell has a cherished place in the American imagination. So does MAD magazine. That Rockwell and MAD are as different as a Windsor chair and a whoopee cushion makes their unexpected interaction all the more fun. That interaction takes the form of “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine,” which runs at the Norman Rockwell Museum through Oct. 27. Five ebulliently overstuffed galleries offer MAD layouts, drawings, toys, videos, back issues, board games, copies of foreign editions. It’s a horn of plenty of laughs. “What Me, Worry” is the (very) rare museum show in which visitors’ laughter is audible.

July 9, 2024—Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech has taken on a new life online, as explored in a recent article in the New York Times.

“Across social media, his work ‘Freedom of Speech’ appears alongside all manner of strong opinions, from the highly serious to the absurd to the esoteric, enshrining itself into the lingua franca of the internet decades after its creator’s death,” the article notes. The painting began to show up in posts on Twitter/X in 2020.

Stockbridge, MA – June 25, 2024– MAD Magazine Finally Gets the Curtain Call it Deserves. Growing up, the Usual Gang of Idiots were the demigods in my comedic Pantheon; The show at the Norman Rockwell Museum is a perfectly curated collection of seven decades of their misdeeds.

Stockbridge– June 20, 2024– It’s an election year, so perennial presidential candidate and MAD magazine cover boy, Alfred E. Neuman, has once again thrown his hat in the proverbial ring. The imp-faced redhead has been a “write-in candidate” every presidential election since 1956, when he  rst graced the satirical magazine’s cover with his trademark slogan, “What, Me Worry?” His headquarters of choice this election season? You’ll find him amongst some 250 original illustrations and cartoons, alongside magazine covers and ephemera that make up the exhibition, “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine,” on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum through Oct. 27.