Originally published in The Washington Post (June 29, 2018).
By Michael Cavna
It is perhaps fitting that Barbra Streisand was among the first wave of celebrities to tweet this month about the killed cartoons of then-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette employee Rob Rogers. Because those spiked cartoons are enjoying something of a “Streisand effect.”
That term, of course, applies to work or information that, as a result of attempts to shield or suppress it, becomes much more widely seen and discussed. And a pure example of that phenomenon comes after the Post-Gazette spiked many of Rogers’s anti-Trump cartoons over the weeks before firing him June 14.
Now, 18 of those killed cartoons and sketched ideas will be put on display in Washington in a pop-up exhibit a stone’s throw from the White House.
“Spiked: The Unpublished Political Cartoons of Rob Rogers” will open July 18 at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Northwest Washington, George Washington University will announce Friday. The 18 works will be in the Atrium Galleries at the Flagg Building till October, when they will join a larger show set to open this autumn at the University of Pittsburgh.
The pop-up was the idea of Sanjit Sethi, director of George Washington University’s Corcoran School, who was moved to reach out to Rogers after he read about the work that prompted the cartoonist’s firing, after Rogers had spent a quarter-century at the Post-Gazette.
Read more here.