When Isabel Ruiz Cano was in fifth grade in 2010, she loved Jerry Pinkney’s “The Lion and the Mouse.”
Her mother was an elementary school teacher in El Salvador, so she spent plenty of time in the school’s library. She said she “grew up around picture books.”
“We were a bilingual school, so it was also really fun because we were able to talk about this book in English and in Spanish,” said Ruiz Cano, who’s now the assistant curator of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst. “We were able to tell the story as a classroom in the two languages that we were comfortable with. Even if after elementary school, I didn’t look at a picture book again, ‘The Lion’ was still engrained in me.”
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art just acquired many of Pinkney’s illustrations, including the original cover of “The Lion and the Mouse,” which was published in 2009 and tells the story of Aesop’s fable of a lion who spares the life of a mouse, and how the mouse later saves his life from a hunter. In 2010, the same year Ruiz Cano saw the cover, Pinkney won the Caldecott Medal for the book.
The collection also includes 39 related works of art from the book — 15 published illustrations and 24 preliminary sketches. It will be on display at the museum through March 9, 2025.
“Jerry Pinkney was a force in the picture book world,” said Jennifer Schantz, the executive director of the museum. “He was brilliant artist and storyteller. His evocative drawings and paintings won him international acclaim.”
Pinkney, who died in October 2021, had a storied career spanning 100 picture books and numerous honors. His work primarily centered around Black characters and aimed to dignify African American images, according to his website. As someone with dyslexia, he found illustration to be the mechanism through which he understood the world and expressed himself, Schantz said.
“He made a career out of not only telling tales of the Black experience, but also reinterpreting tales that are just universal,” Ruiz Cano said. “Even if he was illustrating ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ he’s going to make people relate to it. That’s something that’s very special.”
Now that his work will be part of the museum’s permanent collection, Ruiz Cano is excited that Pinkney’s work will be available for the public to enjoy.
“We’re ensuring that this is in the public trust,” Ruiz Cano said. “We will ensure that future generations are going to be able to enjoy this and to be able to tap into those memories of running into a book in your elementary school library when you visit the museum.”
Emily Wyrwa can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @emilywyrwa.
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