HAMILTON, NY.- The Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University presents the exhibit The Political Satires of Thomas Nast: Campaign Against the Tweed Ring through April 1, 2007. On the surface, late 19th-century America gleamed like gold. Industry boomed. Men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt stood as living proof that striking it rich lay entirely in the realm of the possible. Beneath the thin veneer of the Gilded Age, however, the vast majority of Americans toiled in miserable poverty. Millions - native born and immigrant alike - flooded into cities, crowding tenements teeming with filth and crime. In rapidly expanding New York City, dire urban conditions gave rise to history's first and most infamous city boss William M. Tweed. Buying votes through the dispensing of patronage, the Boss tapped into an almost unlimited political resource - the city's marginalized and exploding immigrant population. By 1871, Tweed and core Ring members Peter B. Sweeny, Abraham Oakey Hall and Richard B. Connolly had politically maneuvered themselves and their henchmen into positions of immense power. Control of the governor's, mayor's and comptroller's office practically swung the City Treasury doors wide open for the taking. Through padded bills, blatant fraud, and routine kickbacks, Ring members siphoned millions into their own pockets. In addition to living large on stolen money, the Ring maintained a "hush fund" which silenced press opposition with liberal distributions of lavish gifts. Tweed's Tammany Hall, the city's Democratic political machine, appeared unassailable.

This exhibition chronicles the campaign of one of the few and most relentless who dared enter the David and Goliath fight against the all-powerful Ring. A lone but powerful voice of opposition, Harper's Weekly's cartoonist Thomas Nast rendered week after week of biting images indicting the Ring in public opinion. In this, his most passionate and creative body of work, Nast made Tweed famous - or more appropriately, infamous. His depiction of the Boss, with his broad potato-shaped head, enormous banana nose, and giant sparkling diamond stick pin, live on in the imagination and political lexicon as the embodiment of political corruption.

To modern viewers, the prints exhibited here offer a snapshot of one moment in Ring history, seen from the artist's perspective. Taken together, the prints paint a black and white picture tempered by few grays. Damning of the Boss and his cronies, the prints compel viewers - both contemporary and modern - to see the Ring as the artist saw it, to be outraged by its brazen excesses, to do something about it.

All of the Nast cartoons exhibited here are drawn from the generous gift of the artist's grandson, Thomas Nast III, Class of 1937. The Picker Art Gallery is grateful to Graham Russell Gao Hodges for his generous loan of supplementary materials.

The exhibition has been curated by Nancy Ng Tam, Class of 2008. Veronika Totos, Class of 2007, prepared the graphic design.