From fedora to fez, from beefeater to beret, and from derby to Davy Crockett, hats are the dominant theme of the 12-city touring exhibition, Hats Off to Dr. Seuss!, at South Lake Tahoe’s Marcus Ashley Fine Art Gallery from May 17 to June 22. Visitors are encouraged to wear Seuss-influenced hats to the show, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the author’s second book, “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.”
Anchored by its permanent collection of Seuss art, the gallery also showcases prints and sculptures available for acquisition. Curator Bill Dreyer said that Theodor Seuss Geisel — aka Dr. Seuss — liked to paint at night, and many of the pieces featured in this show were kept in the dark, never shown to the public.
“He very rarely shared those artworks,” Dreyer explained. “When he got to the end of his life, he told his wife, Audrey, ‘When I’m gone, bring these works out.’”
Hats Off to Dr. Seuss! deepens Seuss’ immortal legacy. As superintendent of a zoo, his father brought home horns, antlers, beaks, and shells. According to Dreyer, Seuss imagined what these animals would want to be reincarnated as, and made a series of sculptures, The Collection of Unorthodox Taxidermy, bestowing them with names like the Goo-Goo-Eyed Tasmanian Wolgast and the Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn.
“He had a serious impact on the arts’ high culture,” Dreyer said. “LIFE Books selected Seuss [for inclusion in its book] ‘100 People Who Change d the World.’ There’s Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, The Beatles, Einstein — and Seuss. His humor, the way he ingeniously made kids want to read, inspires us to use our imagination and creativity.”
For Seuss, the mortal who embodied the Cat in the Hat character, hats were used to to extricate, not mask, the deeper self.
“Hats have inherent magic,” Dreyer said. “They’re transformative. You can put a hat on and become a different personality.”
Over the course of Dreyer’s research, he met with Mrs. Audrey Geisel at her home in La Jolla, Calif. According to Dreyer, she asked him, “‘Would you like to see the hat closet?’ She takes me into the library — floor-to-ceiling bookshelves — and pulls out one of the bookshelves to reveal a hidden room [with] hundreds of hats hanging on both sides [with] feathers, flowers, wild colors, crazy shapes.”
Dreyer curated 26 hats from that closet in Geisel’s home.
“If Ted thought the party was lagging, he’d bring hats out, put them on people’s heads, and ask them to spend the rest of the evening acting out the persona they think the person wearing the hat would have,” Dreyer said. “As Audrey [Geisel] says, ‘When you put perfectly ridiculous chapeaus on the heads of people, the evening takes care of itself!’”
