Art Of Allen Say At Amherst Museum

This exhibit is curated by Samuel C. Morse, Professor, Department of Fine Arts and Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College, and is supported in part by a gift from Walter Lorraine Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.

“It is a great pleasure to host this exhibition of Allen’s work, which deals with highly complex themes depicted with exquisite sensitivity in the demanding medium of watercolor,” states Museum Director, Nick Clark. “His work is an affirmation of how sophisticated great picture book art can be.”

Organized in honor of Allen Say’s 70th birthday, The Art of Allen Say: A Sense of Place explores both the technical mastery and thematic complexity of this prolific artist and author.

Trained as a commercial photographer, Say found his place writing and illustrating children’s books somewhat by chance in the 1970s. Author of more than twenty works since then, including Grandfather’s Journey (1993), which won the Caldecott Medal in 1994, Say has spent much of his career exploring the rich divide between his Japanese youth and his American coming of age. It is his ability to convey sentiments of alienation and dislocation in ways that speak directly to children that make his books so remarkable.

The exhibition is comprised mostly of Say’s illustrations for books, but also contains examples of his commercial photography and oil painting to underscore the full measure of his creative talent, as well as his unifying aesthetic. -- www.picturebookart.org