An artist and author who led the way for children of color to see themselves in the books they read is honored in a new Penn exhibit

Ashley Bryan, renowned author and illustrator, lived to create. And throughout his long life, he created much joy in the lives of others.

Bryan — also a poet, painter, and a musician — brought the richness of African culture, the vibrance of Black American spirituality and tradition, and the lost voices of enslaved people, to books read by children and adults of all races. He is one of the main reasons a large body of children’s literature today is illustrated with people of color. And his impact was not only on young audiences; his distinctive artwork also illustrated the poetry of Langston Hughes and his good friend Nikki Giovanni.

From the time Bryan wrote his first book at age 6, he refused to be deterred from beauty, or from presenting it to others.

“I am essentially untragic,” Bryan once wrote to a friend from Cooper Union School of Art and Engineering, the free New York City college he attended after others refused him because of his race. “I am easily distracted from pain. I cannot resist happiness.”

“Beautiful Blackbird: The Creative Spirit of Ashley Bryan” is a current Penn Libraries exhibit that celebrates and explores this multitalented man who died last year at 98. Free and open to the public, it’s located in the Goldstein Gallery on the sixth floor of Penn’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center.

The exhibit, named for one of his most-loved children’s books, tells the story of “Ashley Bryan’s life through the decades, tracing a path weaving back and forth through all the places where he lived and worked,” Lynne Farrington, a friend and senior curator with Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, said.

It is also the first major exhibition since Bryan’s vast archive of work was donated to the Kislak Center in 2019 by the Ashley Bryan Center, a project created by family and friends to preserve his legacy. Bryan made a point of coming for a visit. He did a reading with local schoolchildren and got acquainted with his work’s new home.

“He was very excited that his papers were going to be at the same place as Marian Anderson’s because he loved Marian Anderson as a singer and listened to her whenever he could,” Farrington said.

The Bryan pieces that have been passed on to Penn include watercolors and oil paintings, illustrations, handmade puppets, linoleum cuts, sculptures, stained glass, journals, sketchbooks, and more.

Born in 1923, Bryan was one of six children raised in the Bronx. During the Great Depression, his Antiguan immigrant parents sent him and his siblings to WPA programs for art and music, and he showed precocious talent.

At age 17, he couldn’t find an art school that would give a scholarship to a Black student despite his impressive portfolio. His high school instructors advised him to apply to Cooper Union, which did not require an in-person interview. Bryan was accepted.

When at 19, he was drafted into the Army to serve in World War II, he stashed paper and pencils in his gas mask to draw some of what he saw. Not only did he witness the horrors of war, he faced the racism of his own countrymen against Black soldiers. He finally put that experience into words near the end of his life in his memoir Infinite Hope.

When he came home, he finished his study at Cooper Union, and went to Columbia University on the GI Bill to study philosophy. As he once told a journalist, he was looking for answers to the question: Why does man choose war?

“I thought I’d get an answer,” he said. “Well, I got more questions.”

An essay he read in 1965 in the Saturday Review titled “The All-White World of Children’s Books” ended up having a profound impact on Bryan, according to an article in Columbia Magazine. In that piece, an educator wrote how a young Black girl, looking at a picture book, had asked, “Why are they always white children?”

Bryan, who learned little about Black culture during his own early schooling, first illustrated early editions of Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, when he was still at Cooper Union. He was so moved by that child’s question, that he went on to change children’s literature forever. In 1967, he began to illustrate children’s books with a volume of poems by Rabindranath Tagore called Moon, for What Do You Wait? Bryan went on to win multiple Coretta Scott King Awards, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and the Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Award.

By the end of his life, he had won just about every major children’s literary award, as well as being named one of New York Public Library’s Library Lions.

His career as an educator included a tenured professorship at Dartmouth, and he was a mentor to younger writers and artists. In Africa, he supported the construction of water towers and libraries, and was given the nickname “LongPapa.”

With what would have been Bryan’s 100th birthday coming July 13, Farrington said a commemoration of this special man will likely be held at Penn before the current exhibition ends July 21. With such a vast and rich collection to draw from for future exhibits both at Penn and on loan to other institutions, Bryan’s archives will continue to touch young and old alike for years to come.

“Beautiful Blackbird: The Creative Spirit of Ashley Bryan” runs April 6 — July 21, 2023, Goldstein Family Gallery, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, 3420 Walnut St, Philadelphipa.,www.library.upenn.edu/event/beautiful-blackbird-creative-spirit-ashley-bryan