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Celebrating African American Children’s Literature: An “Eye of the Beholder” Workshop

As an academic librarian at a liberal arts university, I was asked by our school’s art museum staff to collaborate on programming for an exhibition by African American illustrators of children’s books. The exhibition, called Telling a People’s Story: African-American Children’s Illustrated Literature, ran on campus through June 2018 as the first of its kind. To represent 33 different artists, the nearly 130 works on display included paintings, pastels, drawings, and mixed-media works. Artists included veterans like Jerry Pinkney, who has been illustrating award-winning books since the 1960s, and younger artists like Javaka Steptoe, whose Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat won the 2017 Randolph Caldecott Medal.