Little Monsters

 

Title (Year): A Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), In the Night Kitchen (1970), Outside Over There (1981), Bumble-Ardy (2011)

Material: Paper, Ink, Water Color

Creator: Maurice Sendak

Collection: Maurice Sendak Collection, Permanent Collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library

As a member of the generation called “millennials” (those born in the late 1980’s and 1990’s), I grew up reading and looking at the pictures in Where the Wild Things Are. Like most people my age, and even my parents’ ages, I was a huge fan.  I saw the Spike Jonze film adaption the weekend it was released in movie theaters. People gave me copies of both the soundtrack and the DVD as gifts.  Until I visited the Rosenbach Museum and Library on October 3^rd, I did not know Maurice Sendak had ever written or illustrated anything else.  Even after watching Sendak on The Colbert Report, I didn’t realize how prolific the man had been.

The books I listed above are only a few examples of Sendak’s work that I had been unfamiliar with before my visit to the Rosenbach. Maurice Sendak has influenced both illustrators and children’s book authors for over fifty years and these works were just as influential to Children’s Literature as Wild Things.  The Rosenbach has been a repository for Sendak’s work since the 1970’s and agreed to have his work exhibited year round although the exhibitions rotated in order to conserve the materials.  A variety of Sendak’s work, from final illustrations, cut and pasted iterations and his only mural (the Chertoff Mural painted for a friend’s children) are currently on display in the Maurice Sendak Gallery in memory of the artist. His work is also on display as part of the exhibition Maurice Sendak and Stephen Colbert Interviews, Objects…and Poles!

Maurice Sendak’s career spanned over sixty-five years, so almost anyone who was read or read a children’s book during that time would be interested in seeing the exhibition. It is particularly appealing for parents to bring their children to see. It is a way for adults to engage with children in a museum that is not designed specifically for children. I would not recommend the exhibition for elementary school groups simply because of the limited space and lack of interest a large group of small children would have in the manuscript, rare books, and antiques that are also part of the Rosenbach collection. That does not mean that Language Arts and Literature teachers could not use the Sendak exhibition as a gateway to entice students in a visit to a museum that would also include seeing the works of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, and Daniel Defoe, just to name a few. The inclusion of elements donated by Stephen Colbert would also aid in engaging high school and college students with the objects in the museum as many would be familiar with the comedian and his television show.

As Assistant Program Director, Farrar Fitzgerald, mentioned during our class tour last week, not everyone understands why the Rosenbach would exhibit the Colbert objects (empty beer bottles, pens, a sandwich wrapper and deli receipt), but it is because of the elements ties to Sendak and to pop culture.  The audience that does not “get it” (the Pole exhibition) should not let that deter them from visiting the Rosenbach and experiencing the myriad other works of Sendak, especially if like me, Wild Things and I Am A Pole were the only works they had ever known.