Drawing on the Past A
rtist Anya Davidson attended all 11 community conversations held as part of the Newberry’s Chicago 1919 series in 2019. Davidson distilled each event into a two-page cartoon, a form of documentation that some might not think to apply to something as solemn as the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago race riots. But Davidson’s cartoons treat the moment with warmth, respect, and humanity; they live on as a succinct record of the Chicago 1919 project as well as an homage to the people who came together throughout the year to confront the long history of racial division in Chicago. Here, Davidson describes her artistic process and her experience documenting Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots.
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raphic journalism is a genre G that goes back to the turn of the twentieth century. Recently it’s been getting a lot more attention, and it’s become a vital medium for documenting current events.
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The Newberry Magazine
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