Molly’s new opinion piece in the Guardian:

Squats like City Plaza accomplish their work without a cent of government or NGO funding. In contrast, despite the $803m euros that since 2015 have flowed to the Greek government and NGOs to help them deal with the refugee crisis, refugees froze to death in camps last winter. Desperate, several more have tried to burn themselves alive. Even the best camps isolate refugees from cities, keeping them quarantined like carriers of a disease.

-Molly Crabapple, The Guardian, 6/2017

Full Article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/23/refugee-squat-city-plaza-greece-best-worst-humanity

YouCaring Page to Support City Plaza:    https://www.youcaring.com/refugeeaccommodationandsolidarityspacecityplaza-716186

The Trumpbeast rears his ugly heads again this time as part of the Welling Court mural project in  Astoria, Queens – installed on Vernon Blvd. across the street from Hallet’s Cove Playground. 

Photos are courtesy of Raphael Gonzalez: https://www.instagram.com/zurbaran1/

Molly has finished install the first Bore of Babylon wheatpaste mural in Williamsburg! If you’re in New York go and visit the lovely restaurant Cheeseboat at 80 Berry St. in Brooklyn. 

During a June demonstration in Chicago, two young women, one black and one Jewish, chained themselves in front of the Italian consulate; signs that read “Hands off Ethiopia” hung across their chests. A local paper noted that Chicago had denied organizers a permit on the pretext that “Negroes in Chicago had no need to be worried about what was going on over in Europe.” To the city government, black internationalism was a more immediate threat than Fascist Italy.

-Molly Crabapple

Hidden Fighters . The Baffler. June 2017.

Full story here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hidden-fighters-crabapple

Get tickets here: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/3096?locale=en

We’re delighted to announce that we have new prints available in the shop!

Frida Kahlo	Self Portrait at the Box

The Bore of Babylon and His Consorts

Special 17″ x 36″ edition print, only five are available and each is partially hand-colored by Molly (see example below).

Molly will be speaking with the Left Forum Friday June 2nd at 7:15pm at John Jay College for their 2017 Conference, talking about challenging state repression with art.

..the old “reasonable, responsible” regime of exploitation has broken down. These are radical times. Which means they are times with great possibilities for real radicalism. Still, the left forces are inchoate, without mass mobilization organizations and searching for strategies that can build raw power and generate victories. Our task is to help organize, nurture, and shape the raw resistance that is exploding across America – and help to build what may come in its wake.

Tickets and more info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/left-forum-2017-tickets-30316908690

Molly’s posters from the PEN America protest are now available in French thanks to Nancy Bruseker. Click an image to download a hi-res copy which may be used for protest or educational purposes.

Free hi-res file to download and print for the May 1st General Strike.

Art in Ad Places is a 52-week campaign of replacing advertisements with artwork. Each week, we partner with a new artist to install their work at a payphone kiosk in New York City.

Molly participated by providing one of her works from the ‘Scenes from Aleppo’. The poster was installed in the closest pay phone to the offices of Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations.

more details here: https://www.artinadplaces.com/news/2017/4/14/life-beneath-daily-bombardment

Greece’s Anarchists Are Taking Better Care of Refugees Than the Government

 

Volunteer groups like Calais Action and Samos Volunteers pick up much of the slack. Often leftist in ideology, volunteer groups work on shoestring budgets, but, unconstrained by the hierarchy and bureaucracy found in many NGOs and government organizations, they’re able to provide many supplies one would expect to come from these larger, better-funded entities

 – Molly Crabapple. VICE. March 2017
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/how-greece-became-the-eus-prison-for-refugees-v24n2

Greece Is Cracking Down on the Anarchist Squats Giving Shelter to Refugees

Since the financial crisis, approximately 30 percent of Athens housing stock, and 20 to 50 percent of its stores, have lain empty. Out of these abandoned buildings, leftists wove an archipelago of squats. These are homes, gathering places, community kitchens; some are decaying, others as sleekly artsy as any hipster bar. While most squats house Greeks, they are also an attractive option for refugees, thousands of whom now live in squatted buildings.

 – Molly Crabapple. VICE. March 2017
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/greece-is-cracking-down-on-the-anarchist-squats-giving-shelter-to-refugees

These past few weeks it appears all our worst fears about the fallout of a Trump presidency have been realized. People across the country have responded to the fascist executive orders with righteous outrage and extraordinary empathy by means of protests, writing to politicians, and speaking out across all media outlets.

Molly collaborated with PEN in early January to create a series of posters with quotes from radical and influential writers. We later made hi-res downloads of the posters available for free for anyone who would like to print them for their classroom, demonstration, or protest.  The files are still up here: https://mollycrabapple.com/pen-america-protest-posters/

We also have fine art prints of the above two posters available in the shop. These are archival giclee  prints limited to editions of 25 each, and signed by Molly. All the proceeds will go to PEN America or Black and Pink.

We are also proud to offer a new shirt design by Molly, Fight Fascism Now. The design is available in four different styles and an array of colors. All proceeds will go to Make the Road, an organization that builds the power of Latino and working class communities to achieve dignity and justice through organizing, policy innovation, transformative education, and survival services.

Thank you for helping us support these great organizations. Together we will continue to speak out against this tyrannical administration in every way possible.

Just released article in The Guardian:

We need to fight for each other, every last one of us. Not to “tolerate”, like one tolerates painful shoes, but to proudly say that this world belongs to all of us, and that we’re not going anywhere.

-Molly Crabapple

Trump’s here: we have four years to write a better story via The Guardian 01/20/2017

Direct Link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/20/proto-fascism-america-i-hope-you-like-the-taste

This Sunday January 15th PEN America organized a rally at the New York Public Library central branch.

We had the pleasure of collaborating with PEN to create a series of posters featuring landmark authors who have fought for freedom of expression. 

Photos from the event: 

For more on PEN America, the #WRITERSRESIST campaign, and information  on how you can participate in future events, check out their website: https://pen.org/event/writers-resist-loudertogether/

Molly is in India this weekend for the Hindu Lit for Life literature festival in Chennai. If you are in the area we would love if you could join us for one of the talks she will be participating in.

Molly is also participating in a special pre-festival event in Banaglore this Thursday January 12th at 7:30pm.

Join Molly and fellow authors Raghu Karnad, author of the Farthest Field, Rohni Mohan, author of Seasons of Trouble, and artist Shilo Shiv Sulerman as they speak about Drawing Blood, drawing, dissent, and danger.

The event will be held at the beautiful Rooftop at Bose Compound (directions here). 

More information on this event is available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1840917309465044/

The Hindu Lit for Life Events

Full details on all events and festival activities are available at the festival’s official website: http://www.thehindulfl.com/

Saturday January 14th
2:30 – 3:30pm Sir Mutha Concert Hall:
The Age of Trump – Geraldine Brooks, Mark Kurlansky, Molly Crabapple, Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz, Talia Kurlansky. Moderated by Narayan Lakshman

4:20-5:10pm The Hindu Pavillion
Art of the Tale – Molly Crabapple and Amruta Patil in conversation with Karthika V K

Sunday January 15th
12:45 – 1:40pm The Hindu Pavillion
Drawing Blood: Molly Crabapple in Conversation with Raghu Karnad 

I’ve been doing these year-end, mostly professional wrap-ups since the hopeful early oughts, but, as the sun rises on the ashes of this last very bad, no good year, it feels even more vital to remember everything that was good. Here were some things I made, did, learned in 2016.

1. Painted “Annotated Muses”, an obsessive, grand scale love letter to my best friends. It was exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in September

2. Toured Drawing Blood all over the world, from Mumbai and Jaipur to Beirut to Texas to London to Melbourne, and presented it onstage with writers I love like Omar bin Musa, Raghu Karnad, and Paul Mason. The book went into a second printing.

3. Sold my next book, Brothers of the Gun, the illustrated war memoir of the journalist Marwan Hisham, which builds on our Vanity Fair collaborations. We’re about half done with our first draft.

4. Fulfilled a long held goal and learned to read and write fairly fluent Arabic — enough to talk my way into a closed refugee camp and to translate my favorite short story writer. Despite earnest efforts, my Turkish sucks.

5. Did not do nearly enough journalism, but covered New York street vendors, a triumphant former sex worker in the Bronx, the election, the start of the fall of Aleppo, and refugees trapped by the EU deal in Greece. Also wrote a prescient little bit of fiction.

6. Practically commuted to Istanbul, that city that blinds me with love, now more than ever.

7. Grabbed a sketchpad and some fortifying whisky and drew the media human centipede that is the Republican National Convention.

8. Collaborated on an animation with Jay Z

9. Got interviewed by Christine Amanpour and Janet Mock. TIME Magazine named me a “Leader”. Do not have a gold statue, yet…

10. Read over eighty books, in four languages. Juan Goytisolo, you are my new god.

11. Painted the wall of a building on the Turkish Syrian border, on shaking, sun broiled scaffolding, and lived to tell about it.

As orange grim at the future looks, I still hold to work and love as the two constants…. the long conversations trying to set the world aright, the stories invented as we walk fast, the streetlights disappearing behind us, the flower drawings wheat pasted to walls, the sketchbooks, beauty, art, plans, solidarity, all of that. This next year will be hard, but I’m reminding myself to work like hell, and hold close those I love.

Video Narrated by Bryan Stevenson and Illustrated by Molly Crabapple Portrays the Enduring Impact of Racial Terror Lynchings in America.

More info at EJI.org:  https://eji.org/videos/racial-terror-lynching-america-animated

Her work is a perfect slow-media commentary on our current fast-media climate. At a time when there may be more photos taken each year than in the entire prior history of film photography, drawing offers a different way to reach people, she says. “It’s saying, ‘I cared, I did this, and you should care too.’”

Full Article and Video: http://time.com/4518784/molly-crabapple-next-generation-leaders/

Listen as Molly details her process in creating each painting, her relationship with the muses, and the secret meanings behind some of the annotations.

Full video here: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/molly-crabapple-video-postmasters-657218

The New York Times today released the newest animation by Molly, Kim Boekbinder, and Jim Batt – this time in collaboration with Jay Z and Dream Hampton.

“As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today.”

-Asha Bandele

The full article is available on the Times’ homepage: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/opinion/jay-z-the-war-on-drugs-is-an-epic-fail.html