Pamela Tronsor opened the art exhibit \u201cWomen and the Great War\u201d Nov. 1 in the Hess Gallery in Zug Memorial Hall at Elizabethtown College. The exhibit features propaganda posters from World War I that feature women and their roles in the war, both on the home front and overseas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe exhibit is part of a larger program created by the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, which recognizes the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918,\u201d said Professor of Art Milt Friedly.<\/p>\n
Tronsor began collecting the posters after visiting a WWI exhibit called \u201cAnthem for Doomed Youth\u201d in London in 2002. While there, she wondered about the waste of the war, having never experienced the war in this way on a personal level.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese posters are a rare combination of art and history,\u201d Tronsor said in her opening remarks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Then, during recovery from a biking accident, she read about the war voraciously while bedridden. From then on, Tronsor began collecting memorabilia from the war, including post cards, books and sheet music in addition to the posters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been collecting the posters for 10 years, and soon after I started, my interest turned to women. I now have 37 posters,\u201d Tronsor said.<\/p>\n
The posters were hung in America\u2019s post offices, train stations, shop windows and on sides of buildings during America\u2019s involvement in WWI. They were created to emphasize women\u2019s involvement in the war effort. The ones featured in Tronsor\u2019s collection are separated into the following four categories of theme or motif: mythic images of women, the conservation of food, women workers on the home front and women engaged overseas in the war effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe posters depict women in important roles during WWI. They are informative and certainly help to recognize\u00a0women doing their part,\u201d Friedly said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an effort to bring the community into the war effort and perhaps romanticize war; rather than seeing the brutality of war, we see beautiful and somewhat romantic visions of war through propaganda,\u201d Friedly said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cThe women depicted in the posters working overseas were not classified as soldiers until recently,\u201d Tronsor said.<\/p>\n
The U.S. government needed to sell the war to the American people, so they created the Division of Pictorial Publicity (DPP) since posters were a popular form of advertising. The DPP hired the help of Charles Dana Gibson, who was president of the Society of Illustrators, to direct it and oversee the volunteer artists, who mostly went on to be important commercial illustrators.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe artists had a lot of freedom in creating these posters. The printing was mainly done in New York City, but there were also presses in cities like Chicago and San Francisco,\u201d Tronsor said.<\/p>\n
This was the first time that posters used advertising techniques on a mass scale for propaganda purposes and the first \u201cmedia war\u201d where advertising played such an important role. During the time that America was involved in WWI, the DPP and its artists created more than 2,500 poster design and printed more than 20 million posters using either silk-screening or lithography.<\/p>\n
\u201cSilkscreen is a process that is printed through silk or a synthetic material. Lithography is a chemical process done on plate or stone and is based on water and greasy ink repelling each other,\u201d Friedly explained about the difference between the two.<\/p>\n
\u201cI use a conservation process on the posters because the original paper is very cheap and it deteriorates easily,\u201d Tronsor said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen and the Great War\u201d will remain in the Hess Gallery through Dec. 1. It is free and open to the public for viewing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pamela Tronsor opened the art exhibit \u201cWomen and the Great War\u201d Nov. 1 in the Hess Gallery in Zug Memorial Hall at Elizabethtown College. The exhibit features propaganda posters from World War I that feature women and their roles in the war, both on the home front and overseas. \u201cThe exhibit is part of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":7521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[774,5,775,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-arts-culture","category-campus","category-campus-community","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7519"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7520,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions\/7520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}