It started, as many encounters in the south do, with warm sugar cookies and a Coca-Cola. In 2018, Tim Jaeger, the Director and Chief Curator of Galleries and Exhibitions at Sarasota’s Ringling College of Art and Design, found himself on the doorstep of famed American cartoonist Jack Davis’ family home trying to figure out what to say. He knew that he wanted to produce an exhibition on the iconic cartoonist and illustrator, one of the founding cartoonists of Mad Magazine, and share the life and legacy of Davis with the student body and the Sarasota community. He knew that this was important—that Davis’ hall of fame career, tireless work ethic and insatiable creativity was something that his students could learn from. What he didn’t know was who he was meeting or how the family would respond to such a request.
So he took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
Fast forward a few years, sugar cookies and cold Coca Colas later and Tim found himself once again at the entrance of the Davis family home in Atlanta. The exhibition Jaeger produced in 2018 had been a hit—six years later, Jaeger was determined to bring Davis’ legacy to the Ringling College Galleries once again. Davis would’ve turned 100 in July of 2024, prompting the opening of the College’s latest exhibition, Jack Davis: Legacy of Laughter this November.
“I drove up to Atlanta in late summer, met with the family, looked at more work and started thinking about how this exhibition could be different from the last one. The last one was more of your straightforward, chronological exhibition about the life and times and successes of Jack Davis. This year would’ve marked his 100th birthday and I’m really thinking about what the students could grab from this exhibition,” says Jaeger. “The thing that really stood out to me is that he was so prolific and had so many different jobs that I wanted to show the students and the community all the work that went into the work. In other words, the initial sketch, the art director’s notes, a refined sketch, then a second and third refined sketch, more director’s notes and then eventually, the final product. This exhibition shows a sense of resiliency. It demonstrates hard work, that there is no such thing as one and done.”
That dogged resiliency is what allowed Davis’ style of illustration to become iconic. The path to the top of the illustration world, in a career that spanned most of his life and saw him work in comics, film and television, commercial advertising, album cover art and more, was not an easy one to follow. Born in Georgia in 1924, Davis drew throughout his childhood and kept up the practice when he served in the Pacific Theatre in WWII as a member of the Navy, churning out cartoons for the Navy News. After serving, he attended the University of Georgia on the GI Bill, helping launch an off-campus humor publication, Bullsheet and spent his years after college grinding away in New York City, working various internships and temporary jobs in an effort to get his burgeoning career off the ground. Eventually, when he was about ready to pack up his cartoon dreams and return home to Georgia, he broke in with EC Comics in 1951, freelancing on a number of the publisher’s comics such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Terror Illustrated and Front Line Horror, quickly becoming the publisher’s most productive and reliable cartoonist.
From there, things began to snowball for the talented artist. His style, characterized by explosive, wacky characters, filled with nervous, chaotic energy, replete with often oversized heads and appendages, began to be emulated by other comic book artists at the time. When one of the cartoonists at EC Comics, Harvey Kurtzman, launched Mad as a comic book series (later to become the famous magazine), Davis was an easy choice to be one of the founding cartoonists.
In the 75-100 works that will be on view in the exhibition, visitors will be able to track a stylistic maturation of Davis’ artistic process. “His work in the 1950s is mostly from Tales From the Crypt. The exhibition moves further into the beginnings of Mad Magazine forward, really looking at the apex of his career around the early and mid ‘80s. What I’ve seen from looking through thousands of images of his work is just the looseness and flow but also the confidence of his mark making,” says Jaeger. “As an artist, it’s this effortless but concentrated sense and mastery of drawing. It just blows you away and then the stylization is so spot on that you could put his drawings up against 5,000 other illustrators and you’d be able to pick him out. Still to this day there’s nothing like it.”
Both Davis’ work, however, and the exhibition itself hold more than meet the eye. For Davis’ illustrations were more than just shock-horror cartoons or silly comics—many of them, especially in Mad Magazine, harbored a satirical, socially-conscious edge. “This is a guy who should be celebrated up there with Norman Rockwell. It’s just a different style, but it’s got the same wit, the same political and general humor, the same observations that Norman Rockwell made. Is it a painting of Thanksgiving dinner? No, it’s a screwball illustration. But there’s actually really touching works that comment on American life and times in that period,” says Jaeger.
The exhibition, too, serves as more than just a showing of Davis’ work and legacy. Curated by students from Jaeger’s Exhibition Design and Management course at Ringling College, the show itself is both an educational program on how to create a gallery exhibition and a way to inspire students to strive for more. Four teams of students from differing majors, Creative, Events and Programming, Curatorial and Marketing and Advertising, collaborated to create an engaging and multi-faceted exhibit that will also feature a visual, interactive component in the form of screens playing interviews of Davis and an LED light wall in the shape of the magazine where visitors can scroll through Davis’ illustrations.
“We’re looking at the exhibition through the lens of a student and what that looks like to them. What I’ve provided is a sense of direction and a general blueprint and concept, but it’s the students who are working through my class to design the exhibition,” says Jaeger. “The other part I like about that is hands-on experience with the work is giving them a new story to tell. And they’re learning about something that was completely and totally fantastic that they’ll be able to share with peers and for hopefully generations to come.” Jack Davis: Legacy of Laughter shows at the Lois and David Stulberg Gallery at the Ringling College of Art and Design through March 22, 2025.
