David Small & Sarah Stewart Art Exhibition

The Richmond Center for Visual Arts is pleased to announce participation in a city-wide effort celebrating WMU Libraries’ recent acquisition of a major archive. Featuring Michigan-based artists and authors David Small and Sarah Stewart, the archive purchased by WMU Libraries during the fall of 2019 spans 1970 to the present and documents the artistic, literary, and intellectual life of two of America’s most distinguished, award-winning children’s book authors. Opening officially at WMU’s Zhang Legacy Collections Center during the fall of 2021, the archive contains work tracing the pair’s literary production, professional careers, and personal lives, including journals that feature dreams, travelogues, gardening plans, book production notes, correspondence with editors, librarians, booksellers, other authors and illustrators, as well as fans.

Joining such venues as the Kalamazoo Public Library, the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, University Libraries, and WMU’s Department of English, the Richmond Center for Visual Arts will host an intimate exhibition featuring Smart and Stewart’s illustrations, sketches, drawings, and journal pages that focus on gardening and the natural world. As both a research and teaching collection, works now in the archive have earned such recognition as the Caldecott Medal 2004, Caldecott Honor 1997 and 2012, and recognition as National Book Award Finalists in 2009.