CORNING, NY.- The Rockwell Museum opened another reimagined gallery as part of the 40th anniversary transformation project. On the third floor, next to the Visions of America gallery, a reinstalled exhibit of work by American Illustrators occupies the space previously dedicated to art of the buffalo.

Major groups represented include Remington and the first generation of frontier illustrators, artists of the Brandywine School, and the golden age of illustration. Before the holiday, visitors remember this space as the Buffalo gallery. Then, the space was hacked by scrumptious gingerbread creations. And now, fresh in 2016, it opened as the American Illustrators gallery.

This is just one gallery reinterpretation scheduled throughout 2016. The Rockwell will transform from top-to-bottom for the first time in 15 years. This project is an outcome of a strategic shift to place the core collections of Western and Native American art into the broader interpretive context of American art. In March, a new Modern and Contemporary gallery will open. More details forthcoming.

The Brandywine School was founded at the turn of the 20th century by celebrated illustrator Howard Pyle in order to train professional artists in the genre of commercial illustration. Pyle hand-selected the small group of talented artists who comprised his informal school located in the Brandywine River Valley near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Among the innovative fine art techniques he taught were plein-air painting and Impressionist color theory. Pyle was a successful artist in his own right who spent the last fifteen years of his life instilling his artistic legacy in the next generation of illustrators. Students of the Brandywine tradition exhibit strong compositional elements, a clearly distilled narrative, historical accuracy, and engaging theatricality in their works.

Information at the turn of the century was diffused primarily through the printed word and reproduced illustrations, rather than photography. Due to the wide circulation of these periodicals, professional artists could gain vast exposure for their paintings by accepting these commissions for illustrations. Savvy artists quickly realized that a successfully executed painting could be used both for reproduction and stand on its own merits as a singular work of art. However, 20th century art critics were slow to recognize the illustration genre as a fine art on par with easel painting.

Western fiction was extremely popular during the first half of the 20th century and appeared frequently in the contemporary publications of the day. Because of this demand, many commercial illustrators became experts in the authentic representation of western subject matter. While great attention was paid to the historical accuracy of this mainstream subject, other representations such as gender identity, race, and ethnicity were often over simplified and reduced to cultural stereotypes.