Rob Rogers, cartoonist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 25 years, was recently fired. Rogers was known for drawing acerbically satirical cartoons about Donald Trump. It follows, at least in the minds of the #resistance, that he was fired because he was anti-Trump. The Scrapbook knows about this ruckus only because the Corcoran School of the Arts in Washington has showcased a new exhibition of 18 Rogers drawings, “Spiked: The Unpublished Political Cartoons of Rob Rogers.”
“This exhibition should have never happened,” the Corcoran’s Sanjit Sethi told the Washington Post, meaning that the cartoons should have run in the newspaper instead. “The Corcoran is stepping in to provide an opportunity for this work. . . . It’s dangerous, [as] cultural institutions see, that work like this is being categorically censored.”
Censored? Evidently the Post-Gazette doesn’t have the right to can an artist whose work no longer pleases the paper’s readers or management. Of course, newspapers all over the country have fired so many people in recent years we wonder how some of them still manage to bring out a paper every day, but perhaps, we reflected, Rogers’s cartoons were so profoundly affecting or incisively witty that the Post-Gazette really had no reason to get rid of him other than that he didn’t like Trump.
So we took in the show at the Corcoran. We’re no great fans of the 45th president ourselves, but we weren’t impressed. Rogers’s work strikes us as preachy, too dependent on text, and stylistically off-putting. We tend to agree with Sanjit Sethi: This exhibition should have never happened.
