Museum unveils new summer exhibit featuring cartoonist Ethel Hays

Carter County Museum has partnered with the Western Heritage Center in Billings to bring "With Wit and Style," a touring display about Ethel Hays - the famous illustrator from Montana - to Ekalaka this summer.

Ten traveling pop-up banners share the story of Ethel Hays, a native of Billings, and one of the most recognizable artists of the 1920s. Called the "greatest of all women newspaper artists" and the "foremost portrayer of the American Girl," her newspaper cartoons secured the flapper as the primary icon of women's fashion and established the flapper's modern attitudes in American culture.

Later, as she shifted from newspaper cartoons to children's book illustrations, her distinctive style and unique skill continued to make her one of the most prolific artists of her day. Newspaper articles from across the country, during the 1920s and 1930s, cited Ethel Hays as "The Artist Who Made the Flapper Famous," and "America's Finest Woman Press Artist." She also illustrated several notable children's books during the 1930s and 1940s. With her woman's page art and humorous sketches, Ethel Hays was influential in ushering in a new cultural age for women and changed acceptable ideas of women's behavior, fashion and work.

The exhibit will be on display until Friday, September 2 in the Carter County Museum's Central Schoolhouse Gallery during regular museum hours: Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The museum also has the book "Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age" in the giftshop, as a companion to the exhibit. The book showcases a beautiful collection of comic strips from the Roaring Twenties the best female cartoonists of the era: Nell Brinkley, Eleanor Schorer, Edith Stevens and of course, Ethel Hays.