Traveling
Exhibitions
The Less Things Change: Charles
Brooks and the Art of Alabama Politics examines Brooks’ commentary
on politics in his home state from the 1950s to the
1980s. During his career Charles Brooks drew more than
10,000 political
cartoons. Like all the best
practitioners of his craft, Brooks could take a complex
issue and distill it into a single memorable image,
some strikingly funny, some sadly poignant.
Readers familiar with Alabama
politics will experience a striking sense of déjà vu when looking at the span of Charles
Brooks’ work. He frequently addressed issues such
as the state’s unfair tax structure and poorly
funded educational system and was a strong advocate for
a viable two-party system in the state. Brooks’
cartoons drawn in the late 1940s attacking the Ku Klux
Klan led to threats against him and The Birmingham News.
In 1998 Charles Brooks donated
nearly 4,000 of his original drawings, rendered on
eleven by seventeen-inch sheets, to the Birmingham
Public Library. These drawings are now preserved in the
library’s Department of Archives and Manuscripts.
In addition to two exhibitions at the Birmingham Public
Library, his cartoons have been exhibited at the White
House, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the
Smithsonian Institution.
About the
Exhibition
Curators
Jim Baggett and Regina Ammon
Format
23 24 x 36 panels on gator board
(including title and text panels). This exhibition can
be reduced to fewer frames or panels without harming
its integrity.
Exhibition History
Birmingham Public Library,
March-April 2004
Southern Progress Corporation
Headquarters (Birmingham), May 2004
Birmingham Public Library, November
2006
Below are examples from the
exhibition.The Less Things Change: Charles Brooks and
the Art of Alabama Politics
