Please join us this Sunday, at 4pm, for the opening of: The Children’s Room Wellfleet’s Mid-Century Books for Kids

4pm, Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum

May 29th through Oyster Fest, 2016

Image: Juliet Kepes

Open Sundays in June, 2-5pm, regular museum hours thereafter.A collaboration between the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, the Wellfleet Library and the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum Considering Wellfleet’s size, it’s mid-20th century denizens produced an astounding number of excellent children’s books. These include Juliet Kepes’ Caldecott Award winning Five Little Monkeys, over fifty books illustrated by Ati Gropius Johansen, many by the team of Dorothy Sterling and Winifred Lubell, and a host with illustrations by design icons Ivan Chemayeff and Paul Rand, with his wife, Ann Rand/Ozbekhan. Other authors and illustrators include, Aylette Jenness, Norma Simon and Xavier Gonzalez.Members of this group studied and taught at the New Bauhaus, Black Mountain Collage, and other schools that had adopted the principles of the Bauhaus. These books show another way these ideas were transmitted in a joyful and deceptively simple way.The exhibit includes original illustrations, over 100 books and a Juliet Kepes mural recreated by staff at the Museum of Modern Art for their Century of the Child exhibit in 2012.Speaker (July 13 at Wellfleet Public Library)Stephen Eskilson,Professor of Art History at Eastern Illinois University and author of Graphic Design: A New History.Prof. Eskilson will provide an overview of how mid-century American design assimilated the new styles that arrived along with the influx of European modernists in the 1930s. Special attention will be paid to how these currents found expression in children’s books of the era. Children’s books had an important and often overlooked role in 20th century graphic design, as they served both as a template through which artists could experiment with new styles as well as a medium for imprinting ideology on the minds of the next generation.