July 27, 2024 to June 29, 2025

Moradian Gallery
Curator: Susan Yost Filgate, FAM Education Director

Sometimes, you discover a book with illustrations and a story that you just fall in love with at first sight. That is what happened when I discovered Grace Lin’s magical and vibrant Once Upon a Book which she illustrated and co-wrote with author Kate Messner. When I reached out to Grace through her publisher to see if she would like to exhibit her original illustrations at the Fresno Art Museum, she graciously and happily responded with an enthusiastic YES. We are thrilled and know that the children and adults who experience her work will be, too!

Tapping into her heritage, most of Grace Lin’s books have an Asian-American focus but with themes that make them so universal that anyone can relate to them. On her website (gracelin.com), she states, “Books erase bias, they make the uncommon everyday, and the mundane exotic.” In Once Upon a Book, the main character, Alice, is tired of winter and decides to escape by reading one of her favorite books. As the curator of Grace’s exhibition, I can relate to Alice’s winter doldrums as I too grew up in the northeastern United States where winters were grey and sunless and seemed to last forever. But our heroine Alice took her escape a step further than just picking up a book and curling up in a comfy chair to read. Using her imagination, she actually steps inside the book and becomes a part of the story and the wonderful environments within the pages, her body merging with the visuals. At the end, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she found that there really was “no place like home” when she rejoined her family in the cozy and familiar warm kitchen for dinner.

The book emphasizes the power of books to help one experience other places outside your own reality, to give your imagination wings, and to take you into a world you may otherwise never experience. Once Upon a Book emphasizes the power and wonder of reading and books.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR:

Grace Lin is both an illustrator and an author of some twenty picture books for children and young adult novels. She was born in 1974 in upstate New York to parents of Taiwanese descent. As a child, she dreamed of being an ice skater but found her true talent was in the visual arts. Unlike her two sisters who went into the sciences, Grace attended Rhode Island School of Design and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter (who was the model for Alice in Once Upon a Book), and five chickens. She absolutely loves creating children’s books, and it shows in everything she does. She is a Caldecott and Newbery Honoree, has won numerous other awards, and is a New York Times best-selling illustrator and author. Once Upon a Book was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in 2023. In addition to her exhibition at FAM, she has a retrospective opening at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts later in 2025.

Sponsored by the Bonner Family Foundation, The Foundation@FCOE, and Fig Garden Woman's Club