Drawn from the Ruth E. Engle Memorial Collection of Murray Library, Messiah University, these children’s book illustrations celebrate the art we first encountered as a pairing of story and image. The collection honors Engle’s “abiding love for children, books, and libraries.” Supplemented with works from the Lebanon Valley College Fine Art Collection, the selected works introduce stories from across the globe and open up a broad vista of cultures and places, both real and imagined. Illustrations of classic fairytales like Pinocchio and Peter Pan appear alongside the retelling of folktales from Japan (Tale of the Mandarin Ducks) and Cameroon (Sense Pass King). From an Arctic spring to a Christmas in Wales, one can traverse the history of the Silk Route or journey with Joan of Arc.

Post Revolution Mexico City in the 1920s-30s represents one of the great artistic flowerings of the twentieth century. Foremost among expatriate photographers was Los Angelino, Edward Weston. Under the brilliant Mexican sun, the soft-focus painterliness that had previously characterized Weston’s studio portraiture melted away, replaced by a crystalline hard focus that prefigured his later work. Meanwhile his paramour and protégée, the Italian silent film star Tina Modotti, created photographs that would place her in the pantheon of great photographers of the era. This exhibition features rare vintage masterworks by both Weston and Modotti from the 1920s, as well as photographs from the 1930s by Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson and by Mexico’s own self-taught master of the camera, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Under the Mexican Sky is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions. All prints are courtesy of the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.