The first organizational steps are now being taken by the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union.
“Every day, another place that used to hire human artists has filled the spot with schlock from [AI image generator] Midjourney. If illustrators want to remain illustrators in two years, they have to fight now.”
Molly recently traveled to Perugia, Italy to speak at the International Journalism Festival about the threats we face with the rapid development of AI technology.
Molly sat down with Marisa Mazria Katz of the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting to have a conversation about AI and the outright theft being committed by Artificial Intelligence art generators like DALL-E and Midjourney. These conversations about AI not only have to be had, but also should include those directly affected by its rapid deployment.
We must resist! We have put together a call to arms. We are calling for the restriction of AI image generators and illustrations in publishing.
Molly and I recently completed some new murals in Brooklyn. Why not go for a scroll and come see them in person?
First stop: the much beloved Quimby’s NYC Bookstore in Brooklyn. No boring books allowed!!! Stop in for the best selection of alternative press, zines, records and various curiosities.
The process begins. It always attracts lots of attention.
This construction guy knew the Arabic poem in Molly’s mural. Everyone likes to stop and ask questions when you’re putting a mural up.
The people demand color!
Our supervisor looks on curiously. Does she approve of her portrait? I think so.
The end result… a more beautiful world!
“The night, the horses and the desert all know me; as does the sword, the spear, the paper and the pen. I am the one who can be seen (even) by the blind…”
Al-Mutanabbi
We also stopped by the incomparable Queen of Crowns Tattoo in Brooklyn, owned by Molly’s old friend, Lux Berlin, whose family comes from Ukraine. Molly drew this image of a destroyed Russian tank in front of the golden domed Mikhaelovsky monastery when she visited Kyiv last summer. .
The big news was… we moved. Or rather, we were kicked out. A shadowy LLC bought the building where me and Fred had been for the last twelve years and promptly evicted everyone who lived there. We had ninety days to pack up our lives. The place is now locked up, the electricity shut off. In a few years, they’ll probably tear it down.
we had one hell of a party to send our old place off.We left some love notes on the walls
We’re in South Williamsburg now, where I lived when I was twenty and which will always be Los Sures in my heart. I’m drawing portraits of my neighbors.
Bodega kingRalphy and his crew
Sad as I was to move, I love my new home so much more.
St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral with Some Captured Russian Death Machines. Drawn from life in Kyiv
– I visited Ukraine this August, during the short spell when the war seemed to have been pushed back to the East. I travelled by night train through this magnificent country, to Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa, and also to Bucha where Russians committed some of their most notorious atrocities. I wrote about the experience forNew York Review of Books. I got to speak more about my trip on Democracy Now, alongside my friend, Ukrainian motorcyclist Anna Grechishkina. Anna is now volunteering in Kherson. You can send her money here.
The Bund Memorial in Warsaw
– I also travelled around Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to research my book on the Jewish Labor Bund.
Riga! Just look at it!
I drew Riga’s art nouveau splendor.
Lukiskis prison in Vilnius, which is now an arts centerVilna Choral Synagogue– the last working shul in a place once called the Jerusalem of Lithuania
I used my Yiddish to talk to old men in near abandoned synagogues in cities whose names used to be Dvinsk and Vilna.
The new NYC DSA HQ (how’s that for alphabet soup?)
– I made murals at the DSA HQ, and also at both locations of the scrumptious Georgian restaurant Cheeseboat
Those pants have so much paint on them they could stand up by themselvesCheeseboat on N9th between Bedford and Berry. Try the khachipuri!
Hy Wolfe, gentleman king of CYCO books, drawn for The New York Review of Books
– I started a series of portraits of my beautiful friends, in my great grandmother’s wingback chair. I decided that I needed more beauty in my life, overall.
– I drew a last glimpse of Exarchia before the government destroyed the square like they always wanted to. You can buy a print to support the neighborhood’s ongoing fight for self-preservation.
Exarchia, I miss youMy man Tipu rallies the crowds from atop a taxi
– My 2021 piece “How the Taxi Workers Won,” co-published by The Nation and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, was awarded the 2022 Debra E. Bernhardt Labor Journalism Prize, along with a bunch of other prizes that I forgot about. The best part was how the drivers came to the awards ceremony.
– I did dozens of portraits to help promote my friend Stephen Thrasher’s new book The Viral Underclass
– I signed to illustrate Tiger Slayer, a young adult book about Mughal empress Nur Jahan by my dear friend and the great historian Ruby Lal. I can’t show you our art yet but it is sumptuous.
Most of all, Fred and I built out our new place here in Brooklyn, a place I hope is as legendary and notorious as that old loft on Maiden Lane. It was such a wreck when we moved in, and so many friends have helped make it into a home. I wake up and feel surrounded in love.
All proceeds go towards the ongoing, multi-level struggle against gentrification and police repression In Athens, Greece, and support the legal fees of the vengefully persecuted activists, protestors, and residents of this unique and endangered community.
Cheeseboat is the best place in New York to get authentic Georgian comfort food, and their menu is full of some of the most delicious, cheesy food in the city. Stop by, eat a cheeseboat, and enjoy the new art. On view at Cheesetboat in Williamsburg and Hell’s Kitchen.
Ruby Lal, award-winning and acclaimed historian of India, and Molly Crabapple, National Book Award nominated artist and celebrated journalist, are collaborating on Tiger Slayer, a young reader edition of the author’s biography of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, widely regarded as India’s Cleopatra. Ruby and Molly will be joined in conversation with host, novelist Randy Boyagoda, discussing history and artmaking, and the craft of women’s collaboration as artist and writer.
Join Naomi Huffman and Molly Crabapple in discussion of Kathrine Dunn’s (Geek Love) posthumously released novel Toad.
“A brilliant precursor to the book that would make Dunn a misfit hero and a refreshing take even fifty-some years after it was written, Toad demonstrates Dunn’s genius for black humor and irony, her ecstatic celebration of the grotesque.”
“The Bernhardt Prize promotes journalism that furthers the understanding of the history of working people. The event and the prize honor the vision of the late Debra E. Bernhardt, who worked in so many different realms to share the hidden histories of working people.” – Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives
Molly spoke with Democracy Now about her recent trip and illustrations of Ukraine, alongside Ukrainian journalist and motorcyclist Anna Grechishkina, about how the people there are living through the devastation of war.
Molly spent two weeks traveling through Ukraine this summer, drawing and documenting the ways war has changed the lives of Ukrainians.Read about it now in the New York Review.
“An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class…readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddled times: a clear lens through which to see the world.” —Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
Molly illustrated five pieces for Earth Overshoot Day, to accompany a series of interviews by powerful women explaining how gender equality and healing our environment are linked.
An “Overshoot Day” is the date by which, per person, a country’s natural resource consumption surpasses the earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources in the space of one year.
This series of interviews was produced by The Heinrich Boell Foundation.
“On the occasion of Earth Overshoot Day 2022, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Washington, DC is publishing a series of short interviews with feminist change-makers committed to fighting for people and the planet. We aim to elevate their views on what needs to change in global consumption patterns and how a structural feminist transformation to a more just and sustainable world can be achieved. The interviews feature not only feminist perspectives on economic, political, environmental, and social transformations, but also highlight approaches on how to maintain individual resilience and well-being in a time where many of us feel overburdened by the breadth of global challenges.”
Join Molly, Sanaa Seif, Rosaline Elbay, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for a reading of “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated” by Alaa Abd el-Fattah at McNally Jackson Seaport on April 25th.
“A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade”
LATimes Book Prize Finalist and professor of South Asian history at Emory University Ruby Lal’s TIGER SLAYER, a young reader’s edition of the author’s biography of Mughal empress Nur Jahan, often considered the Cleopatra of South Asia, is to be illustrated by National Book Award-nominated artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, to Simon Boughton at Norton Children’s, in an exclusive submission, by Bridget Wagner Matzie at Aevitas Creative Management for the author, and by Alice Whitwham at The Cheney Agency for the illustrator.
Molly’s story “How the Taxi Workers Won” in the Economic Hardship Project won Best in Show from the Society for News Design in the micro newsroom category.
Judges praised the “gorgeous, emotional portraits of the taxi drivers.” saying “Molly Crabapple’s work reminds me how much I have in common with every other human who shares this earth. In these images, she showed struggle and joy in one stroke.”
