For over 40 years, Signe Wilkinson drew political cartoon commentary, first for the San Jose Mercury News and then for the Philadelphia Daily News. In 1992, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. In 2013 her cartoons began appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Three years after quitting daily cartooning, she got the itch and now draws the Sunday editorial cartoon for the Inquirer Opinion section.
Signe studied art, though not long enough, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia where she was taught how to draw a hand from the late master teacher Robert Beverley Hale who would cry if he saw how little she’d learned. The great caricaturist and satirist Edward Sorel took one look at her wan line of her early cartoons and groaned, “So this is what cartooning has come to in the later part of the 20th Century.” He then took out a sheet of tracing paper and drew over her work to show her how it was done, they remain friends.
In addition to two small collections, “Abortion Cartoons on Demand’ and “One Nation, Under Surveillance”, her work has appeared in many collections, most recently, “Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists” by Martha H. Kennedy. Wilkinson has won major cartooning awards including the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. Most notably, she was named "Pennsylvania State Vegetable Substitute" by the former Speaker of the PA House of Representatives.
SPEAKING: Signe has spoken and given classes at Universities from Santa Clara University to the University of North Dakota (IN JANUARY!) to Philadelphia’s Drexel, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania. She enjoys speaking to women’s groups, retirement communities, libraries and pretty much anyone who would like to see her cartoons.
Her favorite audiences, though, are students. She gives a short history of cartoons from the 1500 to present, talks about her own work and then gets the students to draw cartoons on subjects THEY find important. She has to retrain herself from stealing their great ideas.