War, Revolution, and the Heart of China, 1937–1948: The Herman Collection of Modern Chinese Woodcuts (September 19–December 15, 2024)

This exhibition, an in-depth examination of the modern woodcut movement in the decades leading up to the founding of the People’s Republic of China, will be the first time that one of Picker Art Gallery’s most singular and important collections will be shown in its entirety.

The Herman Collection of Modern Chinese Woodcuts contains over 200 works made in China between 1937 and 1948. They were given to The Picker Art Gallery by Professor Emeritus Theodore Herman, who lived in the country during this period, and his wife, Evelyn Mary Chen Shiying Herman. Professor Herman taught at Colgate from 1954 to 1981 in the Geography Department and was the founding director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program.

Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the exhibition of the Herman collection is an extraordinary resource for the study of Chinese art and of pre-Liberation history. The prints in the exhibition can be seen as direct links to the historical events taking place in China in the years leading up to Liberation. Images made between 1937 and 1945 in areas controlled by the Chinese Nationalist forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War chronicle the progress of the war and promoted good relations between the army and the people; others, produced in the areas controlled by the Communist Red Army, encourage resistance against the Japanese but also illustrate how Chinese society could be transformed through socialism; those prints produced during the Civil War expose many injustices amid the post-war social and political upheavals. Finally, many of the images in the exhibition explore wide-ranging subjects and a variety of techniques that offer glimpses into quotidian Chinese life during this period.

This exhibition is curated by Leslie Ann Eliet.