AMHERST – An exhibit by a prolific artist and author who is an eight-time winner of what is now The New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award opens Saturday, June 8, at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
“The Picture Book Odysseys of Peter Sis” features original illustrations from 26 of the Czech-born artist’s picture books as well as examples of his editorial illustrations for publications like the Times, public art projects and three-dimensional painted objects.
Sis, whose work often involves themes associated with freedom and who once said his “inspiration is my immigration experience,” will do a gallery talk and book signing at the museum Sunday, June 16, at 1 p.m. that is free with admission.
The son of a mother who was an artist and a father, a documentary filmmaker, Sis’ own artistic career was much influenced by having been born into a Communist-ruled country under Soviet domination.
He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in 1974 during a time when he said artists were “completely not free,” worked as an animated filmmaker which allowed him to travel and decided to seek asylum while in the United States in 1982.
Sis has said his books are “mostly about leaving home” and many of his books reflect his own life experience.
He revisits his homeland and the memories and legends it holds for him in “The Three Golden Keys,” which he wrote in the 1990s at the suggestion of his then editor at Doubleday, the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; he has described his “The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain,” a 2007 New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, a 2008 Caldecott Honor Book and a 2008 Bank Street-Best Children’s Book of the Year, as his “most personal work to date,” and tells a story based on a diary of his father, who was drafted into the military and sent to China for two years, in “Tibet Through the Red Box,” which was a 1999 Caldecott Honor Book.
A number of his books have celebrated explorers including the 2014 “The Pilot and the Life of the Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery.”
Sis has also designed a number of the memorial pieces including ones celebrating the lives of Martin Luther King and the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and woven by French master weavers, for the Civil Rights Tapestries project created by Bill Shipsey, founder of Amnesty International’s global artist engagement project.
Shipsey has said he commissioned Sis to do the majority of tapestries in the project because of the “magic” of Sis’s work that he described as “a totally unique style of art that has depth, humor, imagination.”
“Picture Book Odysseys” will be on view through Oct. 27. Its 40-page full color catalog is available in the museum bookshop and includes the essays “On Learning How to Fly with Peter Sis” by Andy Lass and “Journey: Peter Sis’s Life in Pictures” by Ellen Keiter, the museum’s chief curator.
Sis is also scheduled to speak about his childhood and his work in a talk called “Walls and Bridges” Sept. 21 at 1 p.m. at the museum.