WHAT'S SO FUNNY?
CARTOONS BY NICK ANDERSON AND MIKE LUCKOVICH
EXHIBITION EXTENDED THROUGH ELECTION DAY, 2026
Chronicling over half of US history, the comic strip is a uniquely American art form. Since the scrappy slang-spewing Yellow Kid from Hogan’s Alley appeared in an 1895 New York newsprint to expose urban immigrant squalor, Americans have feasted on illustrated social commentary in a box.
Comics fueled newspaper sales and competition between publishers vying for the most readers. Full weekday pages and entire Sunday sections featured dozens of individual strips (color reserved for weekends), many with dramatic storylines pulling readers from one day, one week to the next. Popularizing characters spawned a rich mixture of American cartoon and caricature, a reach extending from brightly-colored waxed papers lining Bazooka bubble-gum to urbane sketches in The New Yorker.
The genre has spread across popular culture. It earned the ultimate badge of Americana when the United States Post Office issued a postage stamp in its honor. A private National Gallery of Caricature and Cartoon Art opened and closed here in the 1990s; its contents now housed at the US Library of Congress, a national treasure trove of depictions documenting our collective history. Art Spiegelman revolutionized the medium when he deployed mice, cats, pigs and dogs to convey a factually-based, agonizing story about the Holocaust. In 1992, the Pulitzer Committee awarded Spiegelman with the first and only prize for a graphic novel.
Today, on America’s 250th birthday, we feature the finest in contemporary narrative imagery with daily swipes by syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists Nick Anderson and Mike Luckovich. Informed analysts, they address cross-generational issues with an art form that jumps from the page. Our gallery often erupts in laughter with this ongoing exhibition, and there is a great deal of head shaking, too. We designed What’s So Funny? to offer insight and humor in quizzical, playful ways. And the response is gratifying.
The very real absurdities of America at 250 fill our walls with some of the most creative lampoons of our time, including original drawings and enlarged, signed and dated editions.
We divided the works into four sections, “The Body Politic,” Messing with Elections,” “Bravado and Bucks,” and “America 251?” to show the progression (or regression of how we as Americans arrived where we are.
The artists starkly picture what’s at stake if we do not heal our nation. Their deliveries may startle, puzzle, even prompt you to reflect. That’s what they’re meant to do.
FEATURED ARTISTS
FEATURED WORK
THE BODY POLITIC
Cartoonists Anderson and Luckovich tune into an America at risk and give us goofy, sometimes exaggerated forms of who we are, how we behave, and the leaders we’ve chosen.
Common to their respective takes on America at 250 is the understanding that without accountability, our freedom will give way to autocracy. That’s why they are so artistically invested in the nation’s future.
They beckon us to check the current daily cumulative impact of our elected officials. Their cartoons signal warnings with illustrations that may seem outrageous, but they actually mirror reality.
Civil society is shredded and there is no tenor of debate, because there is no debate. There are screaming matches, and long silences, and very big divides.
Governor Ron DeSantis, emboldened by Trump’s hubris and anxious to lead the nation himself, reached into Florida’s school shelves to ban books.
Guns are so commonplace in schools, Kevlar manufacturers market bullet-proof gear for active shooter protection.
Our healthcare system has become a literal maze for those with resources while the number of uninsured soars with cuts to Medicaid and refugee coverage.
The American president is at war with the Catholic Church because the Pope condemned Trump’s savage treatment of migrants and the US-Israeli invasion of Iran.
America is where the governing ensure the rich are getting much richer and, well, the rest just don’t seem to matter.
The rainbow covered Supreme Court suggests a time when all was possible, and hopes were high for a more equitable society, and reminds us of the slippage we have seen in recent years.
MESSING WITH ELECTIONS
Shaping the electorate by sidelining women, black, and brown populations has always dominated American politics. Democrats and Republicans vigorously compete in state redistricting and Anderson’s classic Escher Drawing Hands remake tips to both parties in the gerrymandering war. People of color, the nation’s most politically marginalized, have suffered the greatest setbacks.
There have been some heroes. Luckovich lays out hard-won gains featuring legendary civil rights activist and longtime Congressman John Lewis as a bridge to that voting booth.
But in a bitter turnaround, Anderson replaces the famous Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima with six Supreme Court Justices hoisting a Confederate flag. Their Fall 2026 decision marks the highest court’s stunning assault on our freedom to cast a ballot, effectively removing the guardrail against voter discrimination.
January 6th, 2021, still crystal clear in our collective national memory, redefined election tampering as MAGA mobs stormed the US Capitol to forcibly change presidential election results. Luckovich gives us the graphics with the velocity of a composer putting lyrics to music as he draws Trump vomiting the mob up the steps toward the US Congress.
Jestful, but no less menacing, is Stephen Miller’s hope that soaring oil prices will make it too costly for Americans to drive and cast their ballot in the 2026 mid-term elections.
Anderson’s Supreme Court rendering issues a stern warning about corruption of the rule of law. Money Talks, the cartoonist says, and we’re mired in a system where influential corporate contributions edge out our individual rights, and deep pockets now buy elections.
On paper, these cartoons might appear grossly exaggerated. On the ground, Americans know they are reality.
BRAVADO AND BUCKS
During his first term, Donald Trump enabled a full resurgence of male dominance. It was a study in how sexist and base treatment of women quickly developed into accepted practice among some. But to others, the term “Toxic Masculinity” became a buzzword for what the White House wrought. Bullish, self-centered males commanding power and adoration among devoted aides scares off Republican resistance to macho recklessness or sheer stupidity.
Trump’s naïve reach for Putin enhanced Russia’s interference in US elections and a complex of US operatives and lobbyists doing Russia’s bidding. Financial gain for Trump Inc is incalculable but clearly there’s more involved; Putin is a master manipulator and Trump a needy victim. The American president is no less naiive with China’s President Xi Jinping.
Embroiled in the Epstein Files by term two, Trump fanned the flame on others and tried to deflect public outrage by invading Iran, a replay of earlier US incursions in the Gulf. And like those earlier efforts, what Trump expected to be expedient has become an enormous drag on American households as family and individual budgets soar with no end in sight.
Making things dicier: nuclear verbiage. Once uttered quietly, if ever, by past American presidents, nuclear threats now find frequent and far-reaching play, such as Trump’s 40 minute address at the United National General Assembly, which focused on extinguishing Iran.
Trump’s most important measure of bigness, his net worth, promises to see a huge boost as the new White House ballroom empties into his expanding coffers. He already provides access to the Peoples’ House with his palms out. Beckoning large paying crowds to the White House South Lawn to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, Trump = machismo as the President himself became impresario for Ultimate Fighting Championship matches.
AMERICA 251?
In the beginning it was shocking. Each news day delivered another vulgar money grab, another naked push for power leaving Americans incredulous. No president had ever trod on the national ethos with this intensity and it was hard to believe.
The days became weeks, then months, now years of a systematically degraded America.
The commander-in-chief dispatching federal agents as gestapo operatives to arrest, beat and hold people with no criminal record; turning a health system from protector to risk creator; stripping checks and balances from a 250 year-old republic to remove any challenge to autocracy.
There is no balance. Supreme Court justices proudly pander to politicians. Congress lacks leadership and the executive, by its own design, is unbridled.
There is no accountability. Trump’s constant executive orders, military forays, and policy blitzes deflate and defeat. They are designed to effectively exhaust opposition capable of launching cohesive action.
Art importantly reflects this society and our daily illustrators – Nick Anderson and Mike Luckovich among them – are the ultimate visual chroniclers of our time. They are focused on nonstop news flow so many of us recoil from.
In their eyes, the nation’s monetary system is in a noose, American values are trampled by a presidential wrecking ball, and Lady Liberty is on the ground. All of this is happening while most of us watch and many of us worry.
The People have receded into the reflexive while the Politicians have become active, impulsive and destructive.
We ask what we can do to change the equation. We are more than just one person, more than one family, and more than one community. We combine as a country managing competing needs for independence and connectedness with the finest Bill of Rights any nation state has ever adopted. Those guarantees of liberty and justice for all are at odds with everyday life in 2026 America.
Legislators seem emasculated while the public goes to the streets, demonstrating against kingly rule. The federal and state courts pushed back on the president’s overreach, but a succession of Supreme Court decisions afford him more power than any president in history.
Trump’s overreach continues to embolden bad instincts, giving permission to actors seeking to rip apart our United States. On the nation’s 250th July 4th celebration, masked uniformed men carrying confederate flags marched in military formation through Capitol Hill, chanting white supremacist threats. All designed to destroy our democratic society.
Anderson and Luckovich deliver as promised, with lyrical, lasting drawings that ask us to examine ourselves as a democracy, to savor our freedom. Viewing each of these cartoons gives us a belly laugh and shows us what’s at stake.
MIKE LUCKOVICH ORIGINALS
Indeed, cartoonists have long plied us with simple, often scorching visuals. But today’s tools of trade threaten their extinction. Artificial Intelligence now preys on one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn work, replacing it with a blend, an amalgam of once original works.
Remarkably, Luckovich continues to draft with pen and ink on paper. We are excited to show a dozen of his hand-drawn originals.
Today and into the future, Cartoon collectors will find unique and limited edition cartoons increasingly hard to find.