“In America, where the fetish for foreign dissidents runs deep, Ganzeer could have dined out for years on his revolutionary cred, making do-gooders feel brave by proxy just for buying his paintings. But it was a role he rejected as Orientalism; he was sick of how the Western press reduced him to nothing but an avatar for the Egyptian Revolution and ignored his critique of their own countries.

“When you see injustice somewhere you want to call bullshit on it,” he told me. “There’s just so much injustice in the United States.”

“The Revolutionary, No Bullshit Art of Ganzeer”- Molly Crabapple. VICE

http://www.vice.com/read/the-revolutionary-no-bullshit-art-of-ganzeer

Molly Crabapple illustrated the cover for this month’s New Internationalist.

Inside this issue: Icelandic activist and founder of the Pirate Party, Birgitta Jonsdottir, guest edits an issue on the theme of ‘democracy in the digital era’. It tackles some of the thorniest issues of the day: privacy, censorship, mass surveillance, media freedom. But it goes several steps further than most media reports by presenting powerful and practical ways in which we can create a deeper and more meaningful democracy and a richer more rebellious political engagement, using the tools of the internet age.

You can read more and pick up an issue online at newint.org or one of the signed copies in our online store at mollycrabapple.com/shop

Molly is featured in the second issue of The Great Discontent, which “offers a candid glimpse into the lives of those who create for a living.”

Preorder here. Orders begin shipping the week of January 26th.

The artists of Charlie Hebdo join a long and tragic tradition. Mocking pen strokes send authoritarians into paroxysm of rage. Governments and extremist groups around the world target cartoonists for arrest, beatings and execution. Bullies can never take a joke.

— “Cartoonists, killed for their art, and humanity,” Molly Crabapple for CNN

New York State’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs) are the first of their kind in the nation. Launched with great fanfare in September 2013, these courts redefined prostitutes as trafficking victims rather than criminals.

“Human trafficking is… a form of modern-day slavery that we simply cannot tolerate in a civilized society,” Judge Jonathan Lippman, the court’s creator, said at a press conference announcing the formation of the special courts. “We now recognize that the vast majority of individuals charged with prostitution offenses are commercially exploited or at risk of exploitation. By offering vital services instead of punishment to these defendants, the Human Trafficking Intervention Initiative will act to transform and save lives—and, in turn, enable law enforcement to identify, investigate, and punish the traffickers.”

Despite the claims of reformers like Judge Lippman, HTICs are as controlling as any other court. Prostitutes might be called victims, but they’re still arrested, still handcuffed, and still held in cages. The only difference is that they’re now in a system that doesn’t distinguish between workers and trafficked people. To the courts, anyone who’s been arrested for sex work is raw material, incapable of making his or her own choices. Those like Love, who did sex work out of financial necessity, before leaving of her own volition, might as well not exist.

— “Special Prostitution Courts and the Myth of ‘Rescuing’ Sex Workers,” Molly Crabapple for VICE

This week we talk with Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer who has worked in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria. Crabapple is a columnist for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. We talk about art, journalism and the tensions that can exist when your work traverses the boundaries between the two. Molly also shares some advice for those who hope for a career in art. Shownotes available at sourcesandmethods.com.

Stream or download the mp3 here.

On Wednesday, Chelsea Manning – heroine, whistleblower and inmate – turns 27. She has been behind bars for four years and eight months, ever since her arrest for leaking ­classified US documents. There isn’t much prospect that she will be released any time soon … It is against this gloomy and unpropitious backdrop that leading writers, artists and public figures from around the world are today sending Chelsea birthday greetings. Their contributions include letters, poems, drawings and original paintings. Some are philosophical – yes, that’s you, Slavoj Žižek – others brief messages of goodwill. A few are ­movingly confessional.

All send a powerful reminder: that for millions in the US and beyond, Chelsea Manning is an inspiring moral figure who deserves our continued support.

— The Guardian: Dear Chelsea Manning

TEMPLE OF ART
EXHIBITION & BOOK LAUNCH

December 5 – 28, 2014
Artist reception: Friday, December 5th; 8-11PM

Since early 2012, Allan Amato has been photographing fine artists and inviting them to interpret those portraits through their particular medium. An artist’s work can act as both bridge and barrier; at once deeply personal and highly distorted; the lens through which we present our perception of the world, and the world that in turn interprets us.

As a full-time photographer, Amato engages in a daily meditation on art as a spiritual and alchemical practice; that nevertheless demands relentless hustle and a pathological immunity to rejection. During the shoots he found myself asking the artists about their processes and motivations, and drawing comparisons with my own approach to photography and portraiture. But how best to surround and consummate the conversations, the artists and the Work?

The TEMPLE OF ART is a collection of those collaborative art works and musings that provides an insightful look into the lives of some of our favorite working artists. A documentary project evolved from this project as well, which follows the progress of the collaborations from conception to completion, alongside interviews with the artists themselves. The Temple of Art panel at this year’s Comic Con was one of the most covered by global genre press, and the opening at La Luz de Jesus Gallery will be the final footage to complete the film–featuring a live, spoken word performance by Grant Morrison. Many of the featured artists will be present together to talk about what informs, inspires, and motivates them, and how they’ve hacked a life that is both sustained and intensified by making art. The Baby Tattoo book launch will happen mid-exhibition.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA. 90027

In America, the justice system is anything but just. Courts are conduits for the caging of (mostly black or brown) humans. The police feed people into the courts, and if they sometimes kill those they are arresting it’s regarded as a cost barely worth mentioning. And though they kill a lot of people—in Utah, police shootings are the second most common type of h​omicide—they are rarely punished. From the fellow officers who write reports and testify on the behalf of killers to the prosecutors who seem determined to let murderers get away, the very system that claims to monitor the police protects them. Police kill. They get away with it. They kill again. Eventually, you realize that this process is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.

— “Ferguson Shows How the Police Can Kill and Get Away with It,” Molly Crabapple for VICE

Available for pre-order until Dec 2nd are three new items in the webstore. A men’s and women’s sized t-shirt, jersey scarf and a gorgeous sweater dress, all featuring hand screenprints of Molly’s work throughout 2014, these pieces are a limited edition that can only be purchased through the pre-order. No additional pieces will be printed after Dec 2nd.

You can these items, plus giclee prints, books and more in the online shop.

On August 9th, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot a black teenager named Mike Brown. Since then, the city has been protesting. The police did not react well.

This is a short by animator Jim Batt and Molly Crabapple, explaining the events in Ferguson, and the events brought to light outside the city, since the shooting of Mike Brown.

-Molly Crabapple: How Ferguson showed us the truth about police, Fusion

Coding Freedom author Gabriella Coleman visits Strand to present her new book,Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Join us for an in-depth discussion and Q&A on this at once internationally lauded and condemned collective.

Gabriella will be joined by artists and writer Molly Crabapple; and The Baffler contributing editor Astra Taylor, creator of the documentary Zizek!

Buy a copy of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous or a $15 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. All options admit one person.

Nov. 18th, 2014
7.00pm – 8.00pm
The Strand Bookstore
828 Broadway (corner of 12th Street & Broadway.)
Manhattan, NY 10003 United States
(212) 473-1452

For more information on the event, click here!

This is Guantánamo detainee Shaker Aamer’s short story about Colonel John Bogdan, the man who effectively ran the camps at Guantánamo Bay from June 2012 till June this year. Bogdan’s tenure was an unpopular one with detainees; the mass hunger strike that broke out at the start of 2013 was reportedly triggered by an aggressive crackdown ordered by Bogdan, which included intrusive genital searches and the use of rubber bullets to quell outbreaks of unrest in the prison.

In this fable, Shaker claims that Colonel Bogdan is a man without a nose.

-“Colonel John Bogdan Has No Nose,” by Shaker Aamer, Illustrations: Molly Crabapple, VICE

Wednesday, November 12, 7pm
Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center

The New Inquiry, Guernica, and Verso Books present the launch event of Rohini Mohan celebrated debut work of creative non-fiction set in postwar Sri Lanka, “The Seasons of Trouble.”

We’re joined by journalists Adrian Chen and Molly Crabapple for a discussion on the ethics and possibilities for subjective, narrative journalism moderated by Tash Lennard, Senior News and Politics Analyst at VICE News.

Join us for a private afterparty at KGB Bar & Lit Mag from 9-11pm