‘I’ve met friends in my books’: Eric Carle Museum celebrates author, illustrator Grace Lin with retrospective exhibition

Florence-based author and illustrator Grace Lin is known for books like “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” (for which she received a Newbery Honor in 2010), “The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon,” “The Ugly Vegetables,” and “A Big Mooncake for Little Star” (for which she received a Caldecott Honor in 2019). Now, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst is celebrating Lin’s work with a career retrospective.

“The Art of Grace Lin: Meeting a Friend in an Unexpected Place” will run through Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026, at the Eric Carle Museum. The show, which includes exhibition text and closed captioning on a video installation in both English and Chinese, features more than 80 works, including original art, sketches, manuscripts, and more.

Having a big retrospective like this is “a very out-of-body experience,” Lin said.

“I was saying to the curators, ‘I look at all these things, all this work that I’ve done, and all of a sudden it makes me feel like, ‘Oh, I’m kind of old,’” she laughed. “You don’t really realize how long you’ve been doing something until something like this happens – like, ‘Oh, I’ve really been doing this for a long time.’”

The title of the exhibition takes its name from one component of the “four great happinesses” motif – rain after a drought, a wedding night, passing the imperial exams, and meeting a friend in an unexpected place.

“To me, making these books and having kids read them is like they’re meeting a friend,” she said. “I’ve met friends in my books, it’s unexpected, and it is one of my greatest happinesses.”

Lin, a voracious reader, grew up in upstate New York, where she and her sisters were the only Asian American students at their school.

“It was really hard for me to make friends or find friends, but I felt like books were one of the places that I really felt always welcome,” she said, “and I always felt like the characters in books were my friends. Because books meant so much to me when I was younger, it was always my honor and joy and goal to create those kinds of books when I grew older.”

Still, she felt the lack of Asian American representation in the books she read.

“I could see dragons, I could see mermaids, I could see centaurs, I could see a tin man, I could see all these incredible, impossible things, but I could never see anybody that looked like me in them,” she said, “and I think that’s what made a really indelible mark on me.”

When Lin was in seventh grade, her teacher Mrs. Morgan encouraged her to take part in a national book-making contest for children. She took home fourth place and a $1,000 prize, which made her realize that making books for a living was not only possible, but was her new career goal, too.

Incidentally, the first-place winner of that year’s contest was Dav Pilkey, the creator of the “Captain Underpants” franchise.

“I like to tell kids that I lost to Captain Underpants. And they’re like, ‘Yeah,’” Lin said, nodding.

Over the course of her career, Lin has met plenty of children through book signings and events at schools. The interactions she’s had with them have included “the super, super touching ones” and “the super funny ones,” the latter of which often happen after she gives presentations at majority-white schools.

“There’ll be this one Asian kid who’ll come running up to me who will be like, ‘Grace Lin, Grace Lin! I’m Asian, too!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can tell!’” she laughed.

“That’s always so sweet to know that [a presentation] made that connection and it really mattered to them,” Lin said.

Learning specialist Paola Tayvah, who attended a members’ preview at the Carle last week, said she uses Lin’s books with her students. The “Ling and Ting” books, about a pair of identical twins, are particularly good for young readers and English language learners who might otherwise struggle with I-N-G sounds.

Beyond that, she said, Lin’s books offer depth and relatability in their stories as well as high-quality writing and illustrations.

“The artwork is exquisite,” Tayvah said, “and that says to a child, ‘You are worthy of something exquisite.’”

Tayvah chooses picture books for her students in large part based on the question, “Would I want to put this image on my wall?” She said something cartoonish like a “Spongebob Squarepants” book would be a no, but one of Lin’s books would be a yes.

“We’re offering something to the children that is really high-quality,” she said. “They deserve it, especially if they’re struggling so hard to read something. They deserve to have something that they can savor.”

Lin also appreciates being able to bring depth and diversity (in more ways than one) to the children’s media landscape.

“Kids these days are inundated with this hero thing,” she said. “I love Marvel movies, don’t get me wrong. But I think that we get this idea that a hero is somebody who has superpowers or somebody who has the biggest muscles, somebody who can hit the hardest and fight the strongest.

“What I try really hard to do in my books is show that a hero can be somebody who just tries the best that they can, and that you don’t have to have superpowers, you don’t have to have the strongest muscles. You just have to do the best you can, and that makes you a hero.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].