STOCKBRIDGE, MASS.- Norman Rockwell Museum announced the presentation of Jazz Age Illustration, opening at the Museum on November 8, 2025. Organized by the Delaware Art Museum and premiering there last year, this groundbreaking exhibition is the first major survey of American illustration from 1919 to 1942—a vibrant and transformative era of innovation, evolving styles, social change, and expanding popular media.

Featuring more than 120 original works by the era’s most influential illustrators, Jazz Age Illustration captures the sights, sounds, and spirit of a nation in transition. The exhibition explores a wide range of themes—from the glamour of flappers and jazz musicians to the rise of cinematic stardom, and the vibrant cultural flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. It highlights how illustration both reflected and influenced the evolving identity of modern American life between the two World Wars, including the emergence of publications created for and by Black audiences during this dynamic era.

The exhibition draws from the Delaware Art Museum’s renowned illustration holdings and includes significant loans from private collectors, libraries, and museums across the country. Paintings and drawings originally published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and in books by authors such as Herman Melville and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among the works on view.

“We are thrilled to bring this culturally significant and vibrant exhibition to the Museum,” said Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, NRM Chief Curator. “Jazz Age Illustration reveals the breadth of American illustration during one of the most exciting and critical eras in our history. From elegant fashion illustration and spirited Art Deco compositions to powerful portrayals of social progress, the works on view offer a dynamic window into American identity, creativity, and aspiration during the interwar years.”

Norman Rockwell Museum offers a unique context for experiencing Jazz Age Illustration. In addition to Rockwell’s own work—much of it created during the very decades featured in the exhibition—visitors will discover the work of his contemporaries, including Beatrice Anderson, Aaron Douglas, Erté, Loïs Mailou Jones, Russell Patterson, N.C. Wyeth, and others who helped define the visual culture of the time alongside the Museum's permanent displays of Saturday Evening Post covers and other Rockwell works of this era.

Arranged thematically, Jazz Age Illustration also includes audio, video, and archival imagery in one section to ground the period in the Black cultural production of jazz music. Other thematic sections focus on entertainment, theater, dance, fashion, gender roles, the Harlem Renaissance, sports, advertising, and the legacy of Howard Pyle. The galleries are anchored by concentrated displays of mass-market magazine covers and posters, and arrangements that explore the development of the illustrated book jacket, the world of literary “little magazines,” and the booming visual experience of newspapers. The exhibition reflects a period when illustrated magazines reached millions of readers each month, and the increased demand for illustration opened the field to more women and African Americans, forging a collective sense of style, identity, and modernity.

“The Jazz Age was an era of change, encompassing financial boom and bust, women voting, Prohibition, the popularization of psychoanalysis, the Harlem Renaissance, and changing norms about how young men and women interacted socially and sexually,” DelArt’s Curator of American Art and exhibition curator Heather Campbell Coyle told Forbes in a November 2024 interview. “At the heart of it all was a population shift. To escape racial violence and Jim Crow laws, African Americans had been relocating from the rural South to cities since the late 19th century in the movement known as the Great Migration. Young people were moving away from home, working in new industries, and spending more time with each other than with their families.”