Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing
June 6 – October 11, 2025
This extensive traveling exhibition spans over 60 years of Ralph Steadman’s influential and lauded career, and features more than 140 original artworks and ephemera, including sketchbooks, handwritten notes, and personal photographs. Visitors to the exhibition will encounter familiar favorites, like the artist’s illustrations for literary classics such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as well as works for activist causes, branding iconography, and even a life-sized bronze sculpture.
Ralph Steadman was born in Wallasey, England in 1936 and is one of his generation’s most prolific and provocative artists. He is best known for his long collaboration with Hunter S. Thompson, notably illustrating 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Their partnership helped define Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting that blends personal experience with political commentary. He is an active artist today and continues to influence artists from around the globe.
Because Steadman’s works have so often been utilized in mass media like publishing, they have reached admirers with an appeal that crosses socio-economic demographics and national boundaries.Steadman’s work–with its mix of controlled and precise lines, anatomical and mechanical collage pieces, and bold and frenzied free-drawing and blots–is instantly recognizable to an extraordinary range of people. “Ralph Steadman enjoys an enthusiastic fan base,” says education curator Anthony Shostak. “We expect visitors from all across New England and beyond to flock to Bates to take advantage of the opportunity to see original works instead of reproductions.”
The exhibition fills the museum’s upper and lower galleries, offering a thorough exploration of Ralph Steadman’s remarkable career and diverse subject matter. Interactive resources in the exhibition will encourage visitors to look deeply and make connections between works. Accompanying the exhibition is a full-color, 207-page publication of the same name, available for purchase, as well as unique merchandise specifically for Bates College.
The realization of a Steadman exhibition at Bates marks almost a decade of planning between Bates’s former director Dan Mills, Ralph Steadman, and his team; another of Steadman’s exhibitions was set to arrive at the museum during the 2020 COVID Pandemic. Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing is organized by the Ralph Steadman Art Collection, and curated by Sadie Williams and Andrea Lee Harris. This exhibition has previously toured at American University in Washington DC and Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Following the presentation at the Bates College Museum of Art, the exhibition will open at Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia and then tour in the West Coast through the fall of 2027.
Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing is organized by the Ralph Steadman Art Collection.
All photographs are courtesy of the Ralph Steadman Collection.
