Brooks in Art

Authorial sculptures project the power of canonization, familiar to us from such figures as Plato and Shakespeare. The bronze portrait bust of Gwendolyn Brooks, created by artist Sara S. Miller, reinforces her preeminence as the embodiment of Black American literature. Only three copies of this statue exist: one at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; one at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago; and this one, which was gifted to us by the Miller family. We proudly hold Brooks’s archives alongside those of other major poets, including Carl Sandburg and W.S. Merwin. To us, Brooks is the model of the new American canon.

In 2014, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, with the kind permission of the Brooks estate, made our entry into the popular dissemination of Brooks’s work. We commissioned famed printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. (1948–) to visit and print a broadside edition of Brooks’s “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-toward (among Them Nora and Henry III)” as part of the event “Full of Pepper and Light, Welcoming the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers to the University of Illinois.” In 2023, we made a more modest printing of postcards. Our resident artist Carrie Lingscheit designed a lino-cut with the text of Brooks’s poem, “Cynthia in the Snow,” that library employees letterpress printed on cards that were given away. By spreading Brooks’s poetry and work in different forms, visual as well as textual, we can all continue the narrative of change and historical reclamation which is so important in acknowledging true literary history.