Talking about Anonymous and Occupy like an uber-caffeinated New Yorker, on network TV.

New York Communities for Change is one of the most badass organizations in New York. These guys unionize fast food workers, fight stop-and-frisk, did serious relief work during Hurricane Sandy, and are the essence of solidarity not charity. Honored to be a supporter.

I’ll be drinking at their event. If you sign up as a $40/month donor, you get this exclusive signed print of New York Communities for Change member Pamela Flood, one of the organizers of the fast food workers’ strike.

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Friends of New York Communities for Change
Fundraiser and Kickoff Party

Friday, May 17th, 6:30-8:30pm
Two Moon Art House and Cafe
315 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Love the work New York Communities for Change members are doing in the fight for worker justice, affordable housing, and public schools? Come join us to celebrate this work and to find out how you can make sure that work gets bigger and better at our Friends of NYCC Kickoff and Fundraiser!

SPECIAL GUESTS:
W. Kamau Bell – Comedian and Host of FX’s Totally Biased
Molly Knefel – Comedian and Host of Radio Dispatch
Letitia James – City Council Member and Candidate for NYC Public Advocate

Join us for drinks, mingling, laughs, and a retrospective of NYCC’s work and what’s in store for the rest of 2013.

Find out how to become a Friend of NYCC, and how you can get a print of Molly Crabapple’s portrait of Fast Food worker and activist Pamela Flood!

For more info, contact Greg Basta (gbasta@nycommunities.org) or Gina Bull (gbull@nycommunities.org).

Shell Game was covered by the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Wired, Reuters, the American Reader and many more. The openings were attended by hundreds of people –– many of whom, through their support of Shell Game’s kickstarter, made this whole project possible.

I’m starting to think about my next project, which will explore ideas of explicitly digital culture and privacy. I may even work with an institution or cultural organization to bring it to life on the largest scale possible.

Without the support of hundreds of people online, Shell Game would never have happened. The internet believed in me, believed in the promise of my art, and showed that in concrete ways.

The internet gave me Shell Game.

I want to give them something back.

Today is May Day. The day of workers, immigrants, beautiful young girls, and rebellion. I’m releasing all the art from SHELL GAME on Creative Commons. Share. Remix. Make art. Wheatpaste the world.

Click each image to see it in high resolution. Non-commercial use only and attribution is mandatory (see CreativeCommons below).

Shell Game by Molly Crabapple is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://mollycrabapple.com/2013/05/01/shell-game-hi-res/.

Here are some tools I used to make Shell Game:

Princeton Short Handle Umbria Liner Brushes
Silver Brush Silverwhite Synthetic Long Handle Angular
Speedball Standard Pen Holders
Manga Nibs and Holder Set
Golden Acrylic Gesso
Golden Acrylic Medium
Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens (fineliner)
Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens (manga)
Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens (wallet)

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…she often gets Hieronymus Bosch comparisons.

But if you showed most Bosch paintings to a small child, he or she would run away crying. They’re scary, and they’re supposed to be. Molly’s paintings, from a distance, are gorgeous and cheerful to look at; you often don’t realize they’re disturbing until you look closely. A child would look at one of her 6’x4’ paintings and spend all day staring at what looks like a fun story about balloon-wielding cats and police-force dogs and masked rabbits and little birds working on laptops, in Arabic no less. You’d have to be a grownup to realize the subjects of her giant, impassioned panoramas are dissident bloggers in Tunisia and the rise of rightist movements in Greece and the Occupy protests. To a kid, they’d just look like God’s very own circus posters, or a bunch of gorgeous, incomprehensible hieroglyphs whose only purpose was to be looked at.” “Molly Crabapple: Occupy’s Greatest Artist” by Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone

…when her Occupy Wall Street images went worldwide, all that changed. Crabapple was suddenly both a graphic artist for the movement and an emblem of the way that art could break out of the gilded gallery. - New Republic

In 2011 people around the world broke consensus with power. They sat down in the main squares of their cities — Tahrir, Syntagma, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti — and declared that the old machines were defunct. By 2012, the rebellions were partially crushed, or had mutated in ways their initial participants could never have imagined. It was a ferociously urgent year. Things, for the first time in a long time, felt like they might change — that a new world itself might be at the end of a street demonstration.
- Wired

“Crabapple turns to the side and gestures to a painting: a ghostly, burlesque, open-armed muse with her body made of red, white, and blue balloons, floating above a fray of grinning and green-furred fat cats and innocent little mice. It’s beautiful, hilarious, and horrifying. – Fast Company

 Doing big, time-consuming art based around current events is a strange thing. As you create the work, the events you’re creating recede. The world moves so much faster then your paintbrush. The motion in these pieces is just as much about that—an attempt to show how ungraspable, how impossible to hammer down that year was. -American Reader

Saltz’s piece, interestingly enough, is illustrated with a photograph of Keith Haring’s 1982 opening at another downtown storefront art gallery. For all that Molly Crabapple wasn’t even born in 1982, the similarities are obvious: a flat, populist, all-over aesthetic with a real propensity to go viral; the gallery merely one part of a much broader cultural attack. - Reuters

Like the works of James Ensor or Georg Scholz, “Shell Game” goes beyond the political cartoon, using the historic genre as a jumping off point to launch into a series of epic allegorical paintings, rife with hidden meanings, dualities and symbolism. - ArtSlant

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Other show coverage:

Bust
DNAInfo
Feministe
BlackBook
Huffington Post
BusinessNews Insider

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And featuring our show:

Stoya steps into the tub and swims in a mass of green gauze ribbons and play money printed by Crabapple herself. Crabapple’s $10,000 large-scale paintings of 2011′s political uprisings surround her; a rented bodyguard named Mike watches nearby. As Stoya poses in the tub, a throng of Occupy activists, lefty journalists, Jezebel bloggers, and burlesque stars in blue latex take turns snapping Instagram shots with her. The stench of marijuana wafts across the gallery. The windows around the tub steam up. “This is the New York I was promised,” Stoya says outside in her fur and heels, lighting one more Parliament. – Village Voice: Stoya, Pop Star of Porn

A limited number of prints of the Shell Game watercolours are available at my Etsy shop. 17″ x 22″ on Canson art paper, signed and numbered, only 25 of each.

 
Photos from the VIP opening of Shell Game, by Steve Prue.

The paintings have been moved into the space & Shell Game is almost ready to be unveiled! Please join me on Sunday, April 14th for the public opening at Smart Clothes Gallery in Manhattan from 7-10pm. All 9 finished paintings, 9 watercolours and the Wheel of Fortune will be on display, thanks to the funding of 701 amazing and wonderful Kickstarter backers. The opening will also feature free hard cider and beer from Original Sin and Brooklyn Brewery!

Smart Clothes Gallery
154 Stanton Street, at the corner of Suffolk
New York, NY 10002
Opening runs from 7-10pm

Press on the show:

BlackBook: New Exhibitions: Molly Crabapple’s ‘Shell Game’
Huffington Post: Molly Crabapple’s ‘Shell Game’ Paintings Depict A Year In Crisis From Occupy Wall Street To Anonymous Hacks
Wired: Shell Game Illustrates Occupy and the Revolutions of 2011
Animal: Crises and Revolutions: Molly Crabapple’s Complete “Shell Game”
BlogTalkRadio: A Conversation with Molly Crabapple
Conversation with Paul Mason (video)

Thanks to our sponsors, Blick Art Materials, Original Sin Hard Cider, Brooklyn Brewery, and Bombay Sapphire!

  

At 2pm EST I’ll be answering questions at Reddit.com’s AskMeAnything thread. Please stop by!

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1bo9lw/i_am_molly_crabapple_an_artist_who_documents/