This quilt cover features a tasseled basket containing three yellow-green mangoes that refer to the mangoes that Mao Zedong (1893-1976) gave to workers. As leader of China’s Communist Party, Mao received a basket of mangoes as a gift from the visiting Pakistani foreign minister in August 1968. Mao re-gifted the non-native delicacies to a group...

It seems only fitting that Anton Otto Fischer, an artist best known for seascapes, began his career working on merchant vessels and steam ships. After immigrating to New York, Fischer assisted the American illustrator A.B. Frost. This experience led Fischer to pursue an education in Paris, where he developed his personal design aesthetic. Fischer’s 1942...

In the midst of World War II, the war effort was reliant upon the purchase of war bonds by the American population. In 1942, the military could not hold off the encroaching armies without the support of Americans. Graphic designer Lawrence Beall Smith dramatically presented the necessity of war bonds to the public by showing...

In 1918, amidst raging civil war and biting famine, Russia’s fledgling communist government was determined to communicate its values to a massive, largely illiterate and rural public.  It found one of many vehicles in an equally massive propaganda campaign. The government mobilized artists from across Russia to create images in a vast array of media....