“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

This exhibition is about books with both pictures and conversations, and how artists and writers over the past five hundred years have combined words and images to create visual narratives. In each of the works on view here, artists and writers have combined the verbal and the visual to construct narratives that present stories beyond words.

This exhibition explores two currents in the way words and images tell stories: the history of using words and images together, which we can trace back farther than the earliest books, and the narrative structures that make these forms of storytelling effective.  Rather than presenting an evolutionary history of visual storytelling, these selections allow us to situate woodcuts, engravings, comic strips, and graphic novels in a long tradition of word- and image-making, in order to consider the roles of image and narrative in our culture.