A new traveling exhibition of the art of animation great Chuck Jones is slated to start a four year, 13-city tour of the nation starting with New York City in July.
The exhibition, titled What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones, is presented via a partnership between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, and the Museum of the Moving Image.
The exhibition will open at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City on July 19. After closing Jan.19, 2015, it will continue on a 13-city tour through 2019. Notable stops along the tour include the EMP Museum in Seattle, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Fort Worth, Texas.
The exhibition features 23 of Jones’ animated films and more than 125 original sketches and drawings, storyboards, production backgrounds, animation cels and photographs, demonstrating how Jones and his collaborators worked together to create cinematic magic.
The films, shown as large wall projections and on monitors throughout the exhibition, include such classic Warner Bros. cartoons as What’s Opera, Doc? and One Froggy Evening, and the Academy Award-winning short film The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, which expanded the boundaries of the medium with its experimental techniques.
Trained as a fine artist, Jones graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1931. By 1933, he was making cartoons distributed by Warner Bros. Studios. In a career that spanned seven decades, he created more than 300 animated films and received an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. After leaving Warner Bros. in 1962, Jones continued to create award-winning films, including collaborations with author Theodor Geisel on the classic television specials Horton Hears a Who! and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
