Enfilade

George Cruikshank, A Scene in the New Farce of the Lady and the Devil, 1820, hand-colored etching, sheet: 25 × 35 cm
(Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, 2025.33.38)

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Opening in December at Ackland Art Museum:

Laughing Matters: Social Satire from an Unruly Age

Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 11 December 2026 — 28 March 2027

Humor has long provided artists with a powerful means of exposing folly, challenging authority, and scrutinizing human behavior. Laughing Matters: Social Satire from an Unruly Age brings together British and French prints from the 1770s to the 1840s, to explore how artists responded to an era of profound social and political change through pointed visual commentary layered with meaning.

Drawn from a recent gift of over 300 prints to the Ackland from Robert and Jane Sylvester, the exhibition features 100 works, including hand-colored etchings and lithographs, by such artists as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, and Honoré Daumier. Arranged thematically, the exhibition reveals how artists used exaggeration, visual puns, and the interplay of words and images to scrutinize a range of topics, from the arts, musical performance, and the weather to love and marriage, social status, and politics. Although the humor in these prints speak directly to the events and concerns of their time, their social critique and visual language remain just as relevant and impressive today.