A woman’s world
Exhibition explores the creations of progressive artist Barbara Shermund
Artist Barbara Shermund was a woman ahead of her time.
She was one of the few female artists at the New Yorker from the early 1920s through the late 1940s. During that era, an artist usually drew the cartoon but a “gag man” wrote the accompanying joke. Shermund, though, insisted she write her own comic lines, and those reflected women’s lives at that time.
Hilary Pierce, who curated an an exhibition of Shermund’s work that is on view at the United in Westerly, said, “Barbara, with her quite feminist point of view, was given the platform of the New Yorker to do her work. … You look at her work, and it is addressing women’s issues, women’s problems, women’s lifestyles and circumstances, in a culture where only maybe less than a decade earlier they just got the right to vote.”
In one cartoon, two women bedecked in flapper-style dresses have this exchange: “What? Not married yet?” “My dear don’t tell me you’re still married.”
In another, two women are looking out of their window and into one where folks are dancing and smiling broadly. One woman says to the other: “It looks like a marvelous party — let’s drop in and complain about the noise!”
In Shermund’s work, Pierce said, she discusses “women who are making their own money, going to parties, drinking, exploring life, having much more sexual freedom — that period was really a boom for women’s rights.”
The exhibition at the United is titled “Feminine Wiles: The Art of Barbara Shermund,” and it showcases 26 original works by the American commercial artist, who lived from 1899 to 1978.
Shermund saw 600 of her cartoons run in the New Yorker, and nine of her illustrations were on the cover.
While Shermund wasn’t the only female artist at the New Yorker at the time, Pierce said, “I think she was one who had the lion’s share of the opportunities.”
Not only that, but Pierce said, “The work of Barbara Shermund helped to dictate the visual brand that is still holding true today for the New Yorker. Their brand is iconic.”
In the exhibition, she placed two Shermund covers next to two New Yorker covers from June of this year, to show the parallel between a century ago and now.
“So you have (Shermund’s) first cover in October of ’25 next to the work in June of 2023 by Sasha Velour to celebrate Pride Month, so another artist talking about human rights. … I couldn’t believe how visually close they were in the way they spoke,” Pierce said.
Her life
While Shermund’s cartoons left an indelible impression, less is known about her life.
The exhibition features the only known photo of Shermund, alongside self-portraits.
What information that remains about Shermund includes this: She was born in 1899 in San Francisco, the daughter of an architect father and a sculptor mother. She attended the California School of Fine Arts.
The exhibition suggests that two harrowing situations shaped her life. When she was 7, she was in the devastating 1906 San Fran earthquake. Then, at 19, she lived through the 1918 pandemic, but it took her mother’s life.
“These traumatic events would motivate Shermund to not only pursue her own practice as a female artist, but to do so in one of the most competitive commercial art centers in the world, New York,” the exhibition states.
While Shermund flourished at the New Yorker, things changed for women when the world wars were over and American men returned home, Pierce noted. Opportunities for females in the workforce dissipated.
Pierce thinks that had an impact on Shermund; after being able to say things her way in the 1940s and ’50s, Shermund worked primarily to support herself afterward. She created advertising illustrations for brands like Pepsi and Frigidaire. She illustrated a couple of books and, as Pierce’s exhibition text states, “had to make her living illustrating for less progressive magazines like Life and Colliers, as well as the blatantly sexist magazine Esquire.”
Shermund, who never had children and was wed for a brief time, died alone in a nursing home in New Jersey. She was cremated and her ashes remained unclaimed until a distant relative recovered them and in 2018 crowdsourced the money to have her buried next to her mother, Pierce said.
Reflections of local leaders
The exhibition also boasts commentary about Shermund’s work from local women in leadership.
Pierce said that one of the things that was very important to the United was that this exhibition be relevant to the community.
“You know, why do this exhibition in Westerly?” she said. “What I hope I proved is that this exhibition could exist in any community anywhere in United States where there are women who have an opinion.”
Bess Gaby, a local artist, helped Pierce identify women in leadership in the community to ask them to respond to one of Shermund’s pieces. Their thoughts accompany some of the work in the exhibition.
For instance, Nina P. Rossomando, a retired clinical psychologist and activist who is now co-president of the League of Women Voters Rhode Island, reacted to a Shermund cartoon in which a saleswoman is saying to a woman trying on dangling earrings: “Now you look like something.”
In her statement, Rossomando
compared the saleswoman to today’s influencers on social media, telling women what to wear and how to be. The reality, she said, is that “a confident woman today wants to be more than a sex object and to feel they are more than their clothes and jewelry. … We want our accomplishments to be recognized, and we want them rewarded at the same level as men.”
First, the Café
Pierce, who has presented art exhibitions in museums and galleries for more than 35 years, learned about Shermund’s work when she was curating a collection for the Café restaurant adjacent to the United. She was asked to pull from the collection of illustrations owned by Chuck and
Deborah Royce; Shermund’s cartoons were part of that.
(Pierce had another project in Westerly; she completed a gallery at the Ocean House in Watch Hill focusing on the work of illustrator and author Ludwig Bemelmans.)
Pierce found that Shermund “was just a fascinating character with a very interesting life. I realized she was a major influencer in the development of the women’s movement and the way she approached her work.”
Commercial artists in that era like Shermund and Norman Rockwell were really doing social commentary in their work.
“I think they need to be taken much more seriously as artists and as important documentarians of the things that were happening in our culture when they were alive,” Pierce said.
Flipping the narrative
So was Shermund ahead of her time? Pierce responded: “Totally. Or let’s flip that narrative: Is Shermund ahead of her time, or has time not changed for women? Has the needle not moved? And that is the scarier thing. If you look at her documenting what women’s issues (were) — we’ve got her dealing with body image, we’ve got her dealing with marriage and relationships and the power struggle between men and women.”
She added, “If you look at Shermund’s work, it functions like a meme does today. You know, she was writing memes 100 years ago.”