Photograph by Jacob Blickenstaff
Over a career spanning 69 years, Jerry Pinkney became one of the most revered and respected children's book illustrators in America, if not the world.
His evocative drawings and paintings won him international acclaim and brought more than 100 children's books to life.
As one of America’s pre-eminent Black illustrators, many of Jerry’s books prominently featured Black characters, Black history and culture, with the underlying goal of dignifying African-American images.
His books have been translated into sixteen languages and published in fourteen countries, and he has been the recipient of the Randolph Caldecott Medal, five Caldecott Honors, five New York Times “Best Illustrated Books", five Coretta Scott King Awards, and four Coretta Scott King Honor Awards.
On October 20, 2021, Jerry Pinkney passed peacefully at the age of 81.
Please join us as we introduce you to his life and his work.
“I love the act of making marks on paper, and seeing those marks develop into a picture. How rewarding it is to just sit, observe, and paint! But I am a storyteller at heart, which is why I was drawn to picture books. Each project begins with the question,
“Is this story worth telling? Is the manuscript an interesting read? Is it surprising and challenging? Will I, in the process of making pictures, learn something new?”
With these questions answered, I let the text speak to me. The style in which a story is written will offer me clues and give direction."
A storyteller is born
Jerry Pinkney was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 22, 1939. His mother, Williemae, was a domestic worker, and his father, James, was a house painter who also hung wallpaper; Jerry was drawing at an early age and sometimes did so on the backs of discarded wallpaper samples.
At 12, he worked at a newsstand, where he would sketch passers-by in idle moments. John Liney, the cartoonist who drew the comic strip “Henry,” noticed his talent.
“He was a customer and had a studio up the street,” Jerry told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2013. “What I loved doing, he was doing as a vocation,” he said — a revelation to this budding artist. Mr. Liney became an early mentor.
Jerry graduated from the commercial art course at Dobbins Vocational High School in Philadelphia, where he met Gloria Jean Maultsby. They married while he was earning a degree at what is now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and they settled in Boston, where Jerry worked as a graphic arts designer.
Gloria was among Jerry’s many collaborators over the years. He illustrated her text for, among other books, “Back Home” (1992) and “Sunday Outing” (1994), stories about a Black girl named Ernestine that drew on Ms. Pinkney’s Southern roots.
Jerry illustrated his first book, “The Adventures of Spider: West African Folktales,” by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst, in 1964. He continued to work in graphics and advertising for some years, including after the family moved to the New York City area. He said that receiving the prestigious Illustrator Award from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards in 1986 for “The Patchwork Quilt” elevated his profile considerably. The same organization gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2016.
When illustrating history, Jerry said he tried to keep in mind that his young readers were living in the present.
“I think it’s so important to find a way to meet them where they are,” he told Booklist in a 2019 interview. “The language must be accessible to young people and presented in such a manner that they can find something that connects them to the content. This country was shaped by struggle, but I think it’s important to make sure the conversation ends on an upbeat note. Children need to hope.”
Dr. Valerio, the museum director, recalled working on an exhibition with Jerry and being puzzled by the book he was working on at the time, “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” which seemed a departure from the racial themes he had tackled.
“He worked hard at telling these stories in a manner that was both truthful but also accessible to children and younger people,” Dr. Valerio said. “So my question was: Why ‘The Billy Goats Gruff’?
“Jerry’s answer was that he always wanted to change the end of that story. In Jerry’s version, the troll and the goats find common ground and figure out how to live on the mountain together. This optimistic view of creating a better world was the driver of everything Jerry touched.”
"When I am working for children, I aim for clarity with a direct correlation between text and art, but I still illustrate stories not as I imagine a child sees them, but how I see them. My work is my life’s vocation, yet it is also the way I get to speak about interests and passions, the immediacy of drawing and my love of painting. What drives my narratives is the search for order, symmetry, beauty and emotion. I want to lead the viewer into my imagination—a world that exists inside these pictures. I have illustrated over a hundred children’s books, and my wish for each one is that all ages will be able to find something that touches them in some way."
Art as a means of expression
In his early years, Jerry struggled with a then-unnamed and poorly understood learning disability; dyslexia. Because of it, Jerry struggled to read and, more frustratingly, to write.
“Because reading was so difficult, drawing gave me an outlet to process reality, express myself, and dream of a world where I had more power and agency. This book itself is a result of my desire to expand my creative capabilities through hard work and determination to fulfill another dream: to become a writer.”
Jerry Pinkney was one of the most revered illustrators in the genre. His accolades include the Randolph Caldecott Medal, awarded for the year’s most distinguished American picture book for children; he received his in 2010 for “The Lion & the Mouse”, a treatment of the Aesop fable. That book was representative of his commitment to reflecting Black themes and culture in his work whenever possible: He made sure that his richly detailed illustrations set that classic story in the Serengeti, with the title characters surrounded by other African wildlife.
Jerry, who sometimes wrote his own texts and sometimes collaborated with writers, specialized in adapting and updating timeless tales, often in ways that made them more diverse. Just last year he published a version of “The Little Mermaid” in which he made it a story about friendship (rather than one about starry-eyed love), gave it an empowering spin and filled his illustrations with brown-skinned characters. The New York Times named it one of the best children’s picture books of the year.
"A sense of community has always been important to me, and I want that to be reflected in my art. When I speak of community, I am not only talking about the immediate world around me, but also legacy. I am always searching for projects that connect with my culture and the experience of being Black in America."
Talking about race through art
Some of Jerry’s books took on matters of race directly. In 1996, he illustrated Alan Schroeder’s text for “Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman” (a woman for whom Jerry Pinkney had created a United States Postal Service stamp in 1978).
“Pinkney’s striking watercolors enable the reader to live young Harriet’s trying life with her,” Kay Bourne wrote in The Bay State Banner of Massachusetts, “the harshness imposed on her alleviated by the child’s singular spirit in the face of the cruelty.”
Among the most daring challenges Jerry took on was rehabilitating Sambo. As a child, he said, he was struck by “The Story of Little Black Sambo,” a turn-of-the-19th-century book about a boy who bests some tigers.
“It was the only book we had in our home in which a little Black boy was portrayed as a hero,” he recalled in a 1996 interview with The Detroit Free Press.
But that book had fallen out of favor by the time he had grown up, because of its caricatured depictions of Black characters and other racially insensitive elements. In 1996, Jerry and Julius Lester, a writer with whom he collaborated on several books, took a fresh look at the tale.
“Sambo as a negative would always stay negative if it wasn’t changed,” Jerry told The Free Press.
“As a visual person, I felt a responsibility to change the image. The retelling of Sambo is, for me, a natural step in my process of dignifying African-American images.”
The resulting book, stripped of negative stereotypes, was “Sam and the Tigers.” Publisher’s Weekly called it “a hip and hilarious retelling that marries the essence of the original with an innovative vision of its own.” A grandchild was Jerry’s model for the main character.
Younger illustrators of color have been mentored and influenced by Jerry, including Elbrite Brown, who has several books to his credit and teaches at the Creative Arts High School in Camden, N.J. He first met Jerry in 1988 when, as a freshman at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he attended a talk by him.
“This lecture opened my eyes in many ways and provided me with a way of seeing things I never saw before,” he said by email. Jerry’s books had a similar effect.
“Whenever I opened one of his books I could see faces like mine, my family, my community,” Mr. Brown said, “and, through his use of watercolor, illustrated with a sense of class and dignity.”
Andrea Spooner, vice president and editorial director at Little Brown Books for Young Readers, which published various Pinkney titles, said,
“It’s fair to say the industry today might look very different without his ground-breaking work.”
A special project for Jerry was illustrating Barry Wittenstein’s text for the 2019 book “A Place to Land,” about the events and decisions leading up to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. To tackle that project, he asked himself whether King’s sentiments still apply today. His answer, he told Booklist in 2019, was yes.
“Knowing that,” he said. “I understood that in my art I had to redirect the tone of Dr. King’s remarks to fit the challenges of this 21st century, to view the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech as a call to continue the struggle. As marching orders.”
Jerry’s watercolors and other artworks were frequently exhibited at museums, including the Woodmere Art Museum in his native Philadelphia.
William R. Valerio, the museum’s director and chief executive, said by email,
“Jerry used his talent as one of America’s great watercolorists to tell stories in pictures, with the goal of moving society to a better place.”
Jerry’s Honors & Awards
five Coretta Scott King Awards
four Coretta Scott King Honor Awards
Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, 2003
Doctorate of Fine Arts, honoris causa, Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, 2010
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Bank Street Graduate School of Education, New York, 2012
United States nominee, Hans Christian Andersen Illustration Medal, l997
Distinguished Arts Award, Governor’s Awards for the Arts in Pennsylvania, 2013
The Society of Illustrators in New York, NY; four gold medals, four silver medals, the Hamilton King Award, and the Original Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, 2006
Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, 2011
Jerry’s work has been shown in 30+ one-man exhibitions worldwide, including:
the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL
the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA
the Brandywine River Art Museum in Chadds Ford, PA
the Schomberg Center in New York, NY
the R. Michelson Gallery in Northampton, MA
the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA
the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, MI
the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY
the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA
the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA
the African American Museum in Dallas, TX.
Jerry’s art can be found in the permanent collections at:
the Library of Congress
the New York Public Library
the Delaware Art Museum
the Brandywine River Art Museum
the Philadelphia Museum of Art
the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
the National Museum of Wildlife Art, as well as in private collections. His works have also been featured in The New York Times, American Artist Magazine, The Horn Book Magazine, the CBS “Sunday Morning Show,” and on PBS’s “Reading Rainbow.”