The 2021 Herblock Prize!
March 11, 2021
Source: The Herb Block Foundation
Rob Rogers is the award-winning, nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist formerly with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. After earning an MFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, Rogers landed an internship at the Pittsburgh Press. Three months later he was hired as the full-time editorial cartoonist. In 1993, Rogers joined the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Syndicated by Andrews McMeel Syndication, Rogers’ work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, Newsweek and The Week, among others.
Rogers’ work received the 1995 and 2019 National Headliner Award , as well as the 2000 and 2013 Thomas Nast Award from the Overseas Press Club. In 2015, Rogers was awarded the Berryman Award from the National Press Foundation. Rogers received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartooning in 2019. In 1999 and 2019, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Rogers was named a 2019 Emerson Fellow by the Emerson Collective and was the recipient of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists’ 2020 Rex Babin Memorial Award for Excellence in Cartooning.
Rogers served as president of the ToonSeum, a museum of comic and cartoon art in Pittsburgh, from 2007 to 2017.
In June of 2018, after 25 years on staff at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rogers was fired for drawing cartoons critical of President Trump. In his most recent book,Enemy of the People: A Cartoonist’s Journey, Rogers talks about the importance of satire in today’s political climate. Rogers continues to draw for syndication, including Tinyview.com by Andrew McMeels Syndication and Counterpoint.
Judges said:
“In a historically tumultuous and heartbreaking year where so many political cartoonists created outstanding work to both comfort and eviscerate a suffering and divided nation, Rob Rogers cartoons on racial justice, pandemic hypocrisy & America’s political devolution shone bright. Rob is a virtuoso with tongue-in-cheek irony, using at times a deft touch, sometimes a two-by-four, always sharply on target and thoroughly engaging. Long a beloved and larger-than-life fixture in the editorial cartooning universe, Rob is a preeminent practitioner of the artform and his 2020 portfolio is wholly worthy of a Herblock accolade.”
“In an era that will not soon be forgotten, the winner of this year’s Herblock Prize drew work worthy of the history books. In a year filled with incredible political cartoon art, the judges deemed one portfolio to be the most consistent, the most poignant and the worthiest of this year’s Herblock Prize. That is the portfolio of Rob Rogers.”
