The Ken Trevey Collection of American Realist Prints
Description
The AD&A Museum is indebted to UC Santa Barbara alumnus Ken Trevey for this significant contribution to the Museum’s holdings in graphic arts. The Ken Trevey Collection tells the stories of Americans across a broad socio-economic spectrum during the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, the Trevey Collection provides the vehicle for an in-depth investigation into the history of printmaking during the Great Depression in the United States. As a body of prints created during the first period of significant government support for the arts, the Trevey Collection is of value to students and scholars across numerous disciplines, including art history, American history, race and gender studies, and economic history. In its inaugural exhibition at the Museum, works from the Trevey Collection were grouped around several themes: realistic urban dramas countered by idealized country settings, women in the world, men in industry, couples and lovers, old boys’ clubs, and the preoccupation with body image as rendered in scenes of sports and medicine. At the center of these thematic groupings, one finds in the Trevey Collection numerous images of African-American life. In their treatment of the African-American experience, the prints vacillate between a growing yet complicated acknowledgment of the hardships of racism and stereotyped imagery reflective of the limited white perceptions of black realities. “Prints…are the most democratic form of pictorial art,” wrote the organizers of the print section at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The Trevey Collection of American realist prints exemplifies this statement through its diverse depictions of rural and urban, black and white, male and female, empowered and impoverished. Ken Trevey was a television screenwriter and his interest in stories is felt clearly in these prints.
