July is a special month at the Figge Art Museum, 225 W. 2nd St., Davenport, and this Thursday night (July 13) is even more special.
You can get into the museum free all month, and Thursday there will be a curator talk at the Figge, featuring Benjamin L. Clark, curator at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., to talk about the current traveling exhibit on the Figge’s third-floor gallery.
From heartwarming friendships to timeless life lessons, you can learn more about the enduring legacy of a classic comic strip (“Peanuts”) that shaped generations and the current exhibition, The Life & Art of Charles M. Schulz this Thursday, at 6:30 p.m.
Featured in the gallery are 52 original Peanuts comic strips, sketches, photos, and elements of Schulz’s studio that tell the full story of the pop culture favorite comic strip. A range of ephemera — including books, memorabilia, and toys — are also on display, many on loan from a Quad-Cities area Peanuts collector, Celia Maroudas of Bettendorf.
“We were looking for something that would appeal to families and children in particular,” Vanessa Sage, assistant curator at the Figge, said Wednesday. “And so in our search for that, we thought of Schulz and Peanuts and this is an exhibition that has traveled before. It actually also travels without artifacts, without artwork in it, that go to libraries and things like that.
“But this one, of course, comes with the original comic strips and other things like that. So it makes it more special,” Sage said.
The exhibit has been very popular at the Figge, especially this month when there is free admission all July, she said.
The Figge connected with an international Peanuts Collectors Club (which has 283,000 followers on Facebook), of which Maroudas is a member. She loaned about 20 items for the exhibit.
“She’s really well known in the Peanuts collecting group, and she was willing to lend anything that we wanted from her collection,” Sage said. “She has an extensive collection and she especially likes to collect international objects, which is really interesting.
“And so we have Peanuts from all over the world,” she said, noting merchandise like greeting cards from Mexico and Greece. “It just really shows how wide reaching and how popular it is.”
While there are Peanuts books in other languages at the Figge, the original strips are all in English, as Schulz wrote them, Sage said.
“The Life and Art of Charles M. Schulz” opened on June 3 in the third-floor gallery. Explore the personal history of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz (1922-2000) and his role as the inspiration and artistic talent behind the famous comic strip and its unique cast of characters. Follow Schulz from his Minnesota roots to his life in California and see the development of the characters that make up the unique world of Peanuts we know today.
The Figge often looks to supplement traveling exhibits with local pieces, as it did earlier this year with the “Sporting Fashion” exhibit.
“It’s kind of a resource thing and it also adds more to the exhibitions and then we’re taking advantage of these resources that are in the area already,” Sage said.
“We have these collectibles and these toys and things that people might recognize from their own childhood because some of them are also vintage,” she said. “Like vintage books from the 1950s and ‘60s. And so there’s some recognizable objects in there, so you don’t get to just see the original strips.”
The Figge typically features free curator talks to accompany each exhibit (as with Benjamin Clark Thursday night), Sage said.
“Whenever we have these externally curated exhibitions, we usually bring the curator in because they’re the one who curated the exhibition or organized everything, wrote everything,” she said. “It’s a really good resource to have. And so we usually bring the curators in if there is a curator and then if we’ve curated something internally, we will do the talk ourselves, but we usually like to bring in scholars and people externally in addition to so that we get different viewpoints and different programs.”
Thursday nights year-round, the Figge always offers free admission, and a member reception (with complimentary food and drink) before the guest speakers.
The Peanuts exhibit also welcomes people to take selfies, at the Figge entrance (with Snoopy and his doghouse), and in the gallery, where staff built Lucy’s psychiatry stand. Those also have been very popular, Sage said.
“The Life and Art of Charles M. Schulz” is curated by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., and it will be on view through Sept. 3, 2023.
