Jerry Pinkney

illustrator

Personal Information

Born December 22, 1939, in Philadelphia, PA; son of James H. (a carpenter) and Williemae Landers Pinkney; married Gloria Maultsby (artist), 1960; children: Troy Bernadette, Jerry Brian, Scott Cannon, Myles Carter.
Education: Attended Philadelphia Museum College of Art (now University of the Arts), 1957-59.

Career

Illustrator and designer of nearly 100 children's books. Designer- illustrator for several studios, 1960-1970; Rhode Island School of Design, visiting critic, 1969-70, adjunct professor, 1971; founded Jerry Pinkney, Inc., 1971; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, associate professor of illustration, 1986-87; University of Delaware, distinguished visiting professor, 1986-88, associate professor of art, 1988--; University of Buffalo, NY, visiting artist, 1989; Syracuse University, NY, guest faculty, 1989; State University of New York at Buffalo, visiting professor, 1991. Work has appeared in exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum, National Center of Afro-American Artists, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Life's Work

In a career that has spanned more than three decades, award-winning artist Jerry Pinkney has balanced his time among designing books, teaching his craft, and producing commercial and personal art work. He has brought dozens of books to life--particularly for children-- with vibrant watercolor pictures that are beloved by people of all ages. "Pinkney brings the best kinds of talent to his collaborative work as an illustrator," lauded Michael Cart in Booklist. "He consistently demonstrates not only a sympathetic intellectual grasp of an author's material, but also an empathetic understanding of its emotional content."

The fourth of six children, Pinkney grew up in Philadelphia. At a young age he became interested in drawing when he mimicked his much older brothers, who drew pictures from comic books and photo-rich magazines such as Life. Then Pinkney discovered that art could make him--an average student in other areas--stand out at school. "I remember an incident in the first grade when I was growing up in Philadelphia that sort of shaped the idea in my mind that I wanted to be an artist," he wrote in Talking With Artists. "For a Fire Prevention Week project I got to draw a red fire engine on a big sheet of brown paper. I got a lot of attention from that and I liked it. I was encouraged by my teacher and, as I kept drawing, I became the 'class artist'."

Pinkney's parents, especially his mother, supported his art. During his junior high school years, Pinkney took private drawing classes because the school he attended did not offer any art instruction. Another important event happened at this time. While minding his newspaper stand at the corner of a busy Philadelphia intersection, he sketched pictures of the things he saw around him, including the mannequins in the store windows across the street. One day John Liney, the creator of the "Little Henry" comic strip, noticed Pinkney practicing diligently at the newsstand and invited the boy to visit his studio nearby. Liney showed Pinkney the studio and the work he was doing, and gave him art supplies. "I still remember that experience fondly," recalled Pinkney some 30 years later in Something About the Author Autobiography Series. "In many ways he was the first person to plant a seed of the possibilities of making a living as an artist."

For high school, Pinkney enrolled in the Dobbins Vocational School, where he took a commercial art course that included calligraphy, perspective drawing, and product rendering in various media. Pinkney and fellow students studied drawing live models even though it was offered only at night. Pinkney received steady encouragement and excelled in his art classes. At Dobbins he also met Gloria Maultsby, whom he dated throughout high school and married during his college years.

Pinkney became the first member of his family to attend college when his high school excellence earned him a two-and-a-half-year scholarship at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. He found the experience to be an eye-opener. Until that time, he had never been in an art gallery, and the idea of expressing himself through his work was new. He concentrated his education in graphic design, little aware of the possibility of a career in illustration. During his third year of college, he married Gloria, and he left school when she bore their first child.

After working as a florist, he found a position at the Rustcraft Greeting Card Company in Boston. Pinkney quickly realized that greeting cards would not be his life's work, so he learned as much as he could about the industry's design and printing processes before joining the Barker-Black Studio as an illustrator. Pinkney got a taste of the future while at Barker-Black: for the first time he produced the pictures for a children's book, The Adventures of Spider written by Joyce Arkhurst.

Pinkney found that he liked tying his art to a story. For the next two years he worked on a number of textbooks before deciding to break with Barker-Black. He and several other artists formed Kaleidoscope Studio, but by 1971 he decided to strike out on his own and founded Jerry Pinkney, Inc. He and his family moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York, to be closer to the large book publishing houses. To support his wife and four children, he turned to more lucrative advertising work, but he did not enjoy it. He still managed to create several picture books each year for the love of it. Since children's publishers looked for African American artists to illustrate books about black Americans in the 1970s, Pinkney found an increasing market for his skills.

Gradually Pinkney increased the amount of time he spent illustrating. He did African American historical calendars for Seagrams and limited edition books for Franklin Library, among them Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, and These Thirteen by William Faulkner. Other projects included a portrait of Jesse Jackson for the U.S. Information Agency, a poster for the U.S. Parks Department, and illustrations for an article on the Underground Railroad published in National Geographic magazine.

When Pinkney discovered that the federal Department of Engraving commissioned artists to design postage stamps, he contacted the art coordinator at the postal service and showed him his portfolio. In 1983 the U.S. Postal Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee asked Pinkney to join them. As a member of the committed, Pinkney had input into which stamps would be issued. He also designed stamps for the "Black Heritage" series--Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Benjamin Banneker, and Whitney Moore Young, Jr., among others. In addition he created some for the United Way organization and the Help End Hunger campaign.

Many of the books Pinkney illustrated early in his career retold legends, folktales, or myths. With The Patchwork Quilt by Valerie Flournoy, Pinkney had the chance to portray a modern black family, particularly a grandmother and granddaughter. His work on this title won both the Christopher Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. These were only two of the numerous awards Pinkney would win over the next decade, including a Caldecott Honor Book award for Mirandy and Brother Wind, a book about a girl who catches the wind in a bottle in order to win a dancing contest. At this point in his career, Pinkney made the commitment to spend more of his time illustrating books.

Since 1986 Pinkney has taught at various university art schools. Teaching has given him the financial means to discontinue his advertising work, has allowed him to focus on children's books, and has been very important to his artistic growth. Interacting with faculty members and having the opportunity to display his paintings at faculty art shows have provided the incentive for him to work on personal projects as well as commissioned works.

Pinkney struck a balance between teaching art several days each week and working in his airy and light home studio. A typical day would start by nine o'clock and last until as late as eight or ten at night. Pinkney might relax by taking a lunch break and maybe going for a walk. On such days work could be many things, including packaging art for shipping, researching the life and times of historical characters, or talking on the telephone to editors about a work in progress. Naturally, work also would mean drawing or painting. Intent on his art, Pinkney works easily and with pleasure. "Books give me a great feeling of personal and artistic satisfaction," he told Something About the Author. "When I'm working on a book, I wish the phone would never ring. I love doing it. My satisfaction comes from the actual marks on the paper, and when it sings, it's magic."

Before agreeing to illustrate a book, Pinkney must like the story. He told Something About the Author, "I'm able to suggest mood or envision the characters for a book quickly. After reading a manuscript, I know what a character should look like." While he often portrayed African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics, Pinkney also illustrated many books with animal characters. For Tales of Uncle Remus, retold by Julius Lester, Pinkney painted animals wearing clothing and acting like people, while in Turtle in July, by Marilyn Singer, the animal characters lived in natural settings and acted accordingly. "I try to keep a balance in my work," Pinkney wrote in Talking With Artists. "If I find that I'm working on projects that include an awful lot of animals and less people I want to balance it, so I go back and forth. When I get to a point where I've had it with drawing animals, I'll pick a project where there are more human figures involved. The variety can be quite, quite, exciting."

Pinkney's wife and children often worked as models for his human characters, and Gloria occasionally took photos of Pinkney for the same reason. Mrs. Pinkney also helped with business aspects of her husband's work. In the early 1990s, the married couple teamed up in another way. They created two picture-book memoirs: Back Home and Sunday Outing. The books told the story of young Ernestine, a Philadelphia native who dreams of visiting her uncle and aunt's farm in North Carolina. After finding ways to save money for the journey, Ernestine travels there on her own. The visit proves to be memorable and further cements the loving relationships between her and her extended family. Reviewing Back Home for Booklist, Ann Flowers called Pinkney's images "glorious," adding, "The story is simple, but the illustrations are an explosion of textures and colors--quilts and overalls, baskets and peaches, linoleum and weathered wood--and, clearly, kind and loving people." In Something About the Author, Pinkney described himself as "terrible at perspective," and added, "As a result, I distort, but in a way that makes the illustrations work. I don't see things until I draw them. When I put a line down, the only thing I know is how it should feel and I know when it doesn't feel right."

Pinkney took advantage of his popularity and critical acclaim to arrange school visits and talks with children about his work. Taking his role as a model seriously, he offered school children and art students the kind of encouragement that he received as a boy. During these visits Pinkney noticed the wide ethnic diversity in the classroom. Many of his later projects, such as Pretend You're a Cat and Home Place, reflected this cultural diversity, and Pinkney would like to do more. "These are the kinds of projects I'm looking for," Pinkney wrote in Something About the Author Autobiographical Series. "These books are needed and are my contribution in terms of my concern for this country and the issue of racism."

Awards

National Book Award finalist and Newberry Medal for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, 1977; Carter G. Woodson Award for Childtimes: A Three- Generation Memoir and Count on Your Fingers African Style, 1980; Coretta Scott King Awards for The Patchwork Quilt, 1986, Half a Moon and One Whole Star, 1987, Mirandy and Brother Wind, 1988; Caldecott Honor Book for Mirandy and Brother Wind, 1989, and The Talking Eggs, 1990.

Works

Writings

• Selected Books Illustrated for Children The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales, written by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst, Little, Brown, 1964.
• Folktales and Fairytales of Africa, compiled by Lila Green, Silver Burdett, 1967.
• Babushka and the Pig, written by Ann Trofimuk, Houghton, 1969.
• More Adventures of Spider, written by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst, Scholastic Book Services, 1972.
• Song of the Trees, written by Mildred D. Taylor, Dial, 1975.
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, written by Mildred D. Taylor, Dial, 1976.
• Mary McLeod Bethune (biography), written by Eloise Greenfield, Crowell, 1977.
• Tonweya and the Eagles, and Other Lakota Indian Tales, written by Rosebud Yellow Robe, Dial, 1979.
• Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir, written by Eloise Greenfield and Lessie Jones Little, Crowell, 1979.
• Count on Your Fingers African Style, written by Glaudia Zaslavsky, Crowell, 1980.
• The Patchwork Quilt, written by Valerie Flournoy, Dial, 1985.
• Half a Moon and One Whole Star, written by Crescent Dragonwagon, Macmillan, 1986.
• Creatures of the Desert World and Strange Animals of the Sea, written by Barbara Gibson, National Geographic Society, 1987.
• The Tales of Uncle Remus, written by Julius Lester, Dial, 1987.
• More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies and Others, written by Julius Lester, Dial, 1988.
• Mirandy and Brother Wind, written by Pat McKissack, Knopf, 1988.
• The Talking Eggs, written by Robert D. San Souci, Dial, 1989.
• Turtle in July, written by Marilyn Singer, Macmillan, 1989.
• Home Place, written by Crescent Dragonwagon, Macmillan, 1990.
• Pretend You're a Cat, written by Jean Marzollo, Dial, 1990.
• Back Home, written by Gloria Jean Pinkney, Dial/Penguin, 1992.
• The Last Tales of Uncle Remus, written by Julius Lester, Dial, 1994.
• The Sunday Outing, written by Gloria Jean Pinkney, Dial/Penguin, 1994.
• John Henry, written by Julius Lester, Dial, 1994.
• Tanya's Reunion, written by Valerie Flournoy, Dial, 1995.
• Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman, written by Alan Schroeder, Dial/Penguin, 1996.
• The Hired Hand: An African-American Folktale, written by Robert D. San Souci, Dial, 1997.

Further Reading

Books

• Something About the Author, Volume 41, Gale Research, 1985; Volume 71, 1993.
• Something About the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 12, Gale Research, 1991.
• Cummings, Pat, compiler and ed., Talking with Artists, Bradbury Press, 1992.

• Booklist, October 15, 1993, p. 452; December 15, 1993, p. 750; May 1, 1994, p. 1609; June 1, 1994, p. 1809; September 1, 1995, p. 85; October 15, 1995, p. 404; February 15, 1996, p. 1024; June 1, 1996, p. 1722; February 15, 1997, p. 1025.
• Entertainment Weekly, January 28, 1994, p. 70.
• Horn Book, January/February 1993, p. 83; November/December 1993, p. 734; May/June 1994, p. 341; September/October 1994, p. 581; November/December 1994, p. 739; September/October 1995, p. 587; January/February 1996, p. 99; September/October 1996, p. 589; New York Times, May 23, 1993, pp. WC4-WC5.
• Publishers Weekly, July 5, 1993, p. 71; August 9, 1993, p. 478; May 23, 1994, p. 88; September 5, 1994, p. 108; September 18, 1995, p. 131; August 5, 1996, p. 441.
• U.S. News and World Report, December 5, 1994, p. 95.

• Additional information for this profile was obtained from Meet the Caldecott Illustrator: Jerry Pinkney (videotape), "American School Publishers" series, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing, 1991.

— Jeanne M. Lesinski

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