Exhibit - Glitter & Chalk: Carnival Prize Caricatures, 1915-1960
On exhibit until September 28^th at the Silver City Museum, Silver City,
New Mexico

The exhibit features a large number of carnival chalkware statues loaned from the collection of Eric Renner, along with Renner’s one-of-a-kind photographic “portraits” of individual chalkware figures.  Each image resulted from ten-to-thirty-minute time exposures using a pinhole camera and Polaroid 809 color film. 

Cheaply manufactured, mass-produced plaster figurines were awarded as prizes in the ring toss or other games of chance at carnivals throughout the United States in the early twentieth century.  They depicted popular media figures of their day, including vaudeville performers, cartoon characters, advertising icons, movie stars, and sports celebrities.  Some carnival chalkware images revealed the darker side of American attitudes, through use of racial stereotypes.  Military figurines were popular during World War II, along with patriotic symbols and unflattering portrayals of enemy leaders.   

 “I admit that I fell in love with carnival chalk prizes right away, due to their sometimes sloppily airbrushed caricaturesque quality, a less than elegant imitation of a well-known media star,” Renner says.  “Most of all they talked to me.  I didn’t really know why. But I couldn’t resist purchasing a foot-high glittered Snow White painted red, orange and blue, or a Lone Ranger painted lavender, green, pink, and yellow.” 

Beyond visual interest, Renner came to realize that each figure had been frozen in time in its own media metaphor.  “Although historically obscure, their significance completely unrecognized, carnival chalk prizes were some of the first caricatures of the most important of these early American media stars,” he says.  “In sum total they give a reasonably full picture of an America in its mass-media infancy, its population influenced by invention, promotion, merchandising, and disguise.”

GLITTER AND CHALK: CARNIVAL PRIZE CARICATURES, 1915-1960 - ILLUSTRATED LECTURE - Sunday, May 18, 2008, 2 p.m.  

The fascinating and little-known history of early 20th-century carnival chalkware prizes will be the subject of an illustrated lecture by Eric Renner at the Silco Theater. An admission donation of $4 per person is suggested. Over 150 pieces from Renner’s extensive collection of carnival chalkware are being shown through September in the Silver City Museum’s featured exhibit, "Glitter & Chalk: Carnival Prize Caricatures, 1915-1960." Renner is the author of American Disguise (Flying Monkeys Press, 2007), which explores the images and archetypes found in the cheap plaster figurines once awarded as prizes by traveling carnivals. Copies of the book will be available at the lecture, and are also on sale at the Silver City Museum Store.

“Glitter & Chalk” will continue its run at the Silver City Museum through September 28. Copies of Eric Renner’s book on carnival chalkware, ‘American Disguise’, will be available through the Museum Store.  For more information, call the Museum at (575) 538-5921 or toll-free for long-distance callers at (877) 777-7947, or visit www.silvercitymuseum.org