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

For more info on Writing the War: http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/2016-festival/writing-the-war

For more info on Dark Nights, Bright Words: https://www.facebook.com/events/937367443051721/ (tickets $5)

WE COULD NOT BE MORE EXCITED! 

Annotated Muses, a gigantic 11 painting show, will finally be available for public viewing THIS SATURDAY September 10th! This may be your one chance to see the paintings all together in one place as they’re meant to be seen, along with many of the amazing women who are depicted.

PLUS: Our good friend Stoya will be LIVE ANNOTATING her portrait in the gallery.

For the first time ever Molly will be visiting Australia from August 30th – September 4th! Please come by an event and say hi!

Melbourne Writer’s Festival:

September 2nd at 1pm : PROTEST AND REBELLION

September 2nd at 8:30pm: DRAWING BLOOD

September 3rd at 10am: THE ARTISTS’ SKETCHBOOKS

Festival of Dangerous Ideas: 

 September 4th at 2pm: FROM THE FRONTLINE

I had never been to a political convention. I don’t cover electoral politics, but when The Daily Beast offered me the chance to cover the most hyped presidential nomination since Hubert Humphrey’s kicked off the Siege of Chicago, I grabbed my sketchbook and went. This was history, I thought. A neon-skinned huckster was going to crown himself as king.

 – Molly Crabapple, The Daily Beast 07/24/2016

This past week Molly was in attendance at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.  It was a fascinating, history-in-the-making, deeply disturbing, snafu of epic proportions. In words and drawings Molly has created a summary of the experience for the Daily Beast  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/24/good-mourning-america-the-republican-national-convention-illustrated.html

Due to many requests we’ve made two paintings from the convention available as prints in the shop. The above ‘Trump Coronation‘ and the following, ‘Trump Pageantry‘. are available as giclee 17″x22″ archival prints in limited edition runs of 25 each.

In case you missed it, before the RNC Molly wrote a prescient piece for The Village Voice detailing the events that would unfold.

Donald J. Trump ascends to the stage wearing a codpiece fashioned from the severed head of Ronald Reagan, the eyes replaced by diamonds and the skin spray-tanned to match Trump’s own. His robe is gilt, lined with more gilt. Marco Rubio holds the train in his teeth.

“Isn’t he fabulous?” Trump laughs, patting the codpiece with one petite hand. At his touch, the diamonds turn into snakes. “You’ll all have one of these, once I make America great again.”

Check out the rest: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-donny-dystrumpia-takes-hold-at-the-republican-national-convention-8850118

and finally, yes, ladies and gentlemen:  there was in fact a giant golden trump bobble head statue.

We’ve just released photos of the final versions of some of the Annotated Muses paintings. If you’ve been following Molly on twitter and instagram you’ve no doubt seen some of these as works in progress.

The paintings will be unveiled to public viewing Saturday September 10th 2016 at the Postmasters Gallery in New York. For inquiries please contact Postmasters at ‘postmasters @ thing.net’

View a preview of the show here

Exclusionary tribalism is making a comeback. In America, the Cheetos Fascist rallies the crowds with promises to Make America Great Again, a feat he intends to accomplish by kicking out Mexicans and Muslims, and kicking black people down. Never mind that his Great America never actually existed. And though the Brexit was a 17.4-million-vote fuck you to David Cameron and the austerity-loving EU, it was also a self-destructive convulsion of xenophobia. Within days, eastern Europeans and people of color reported over a hundred instances of racist abuse. A letter reading “Leave the EU. No more Polish vermin” appeared in the mailboxes of Polish families in Huntingdon. To many Leave voters, taking Britain back meant more than booting out the EU’s technocrats – they wanted to purge their island of foreigners and brown people too.

-Molly Crabapple

Across the world minds are narrowing. We must fight back. The Guardian 06/27/2016 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/global-intolerance-donald-trump-arts-solidarity-inclusion

Molly and frequent collaborator Marwan Hisham are writing and illustrating a book detailing Marwan’s experiences in the Syrian war – from his youth to the Arab Spring to the current ISIS occupation. It will be published by Random House/Penguin’s newly revitalized One World imprint and spearheaded by the brilliant editor Chris Jackson.

For a look at their past collaborations in Vanity Fair please check out the following links to the Vanity Fair Website:

Scenes from Daily Life in the de Facto Capital of ISIS
Scenes from Daily Life Inside ISIS-Controlled Mosul
Scenes from Inside Aleppo: How Life Has Been Transformed by Rebel Rule

Out now is a follow-up to Molly’s special report from 2015 on New York City’s prostitution courts. Includes a new interview with the amazing  Love.

When Love was a sex worker in Hunts Point, she said, police knew where women like her lived, and snatched them whenever they ventured outside—whether they were doing sex work or not. Because many of these women were poor, and some had problems with pimps or addiction, they made deals with prosecutors rather than try to fight. One lawyer familiar with the courts told me that, even in the rare occasions when an undercover officer was caught making a false arrest, he suffered no professional consequences beyond embarrassment.

Click here for full article: https://www.vice.com/read/the-woman-who-fought-and-won-against-new-yorks-special-prostitution-courts

This week Molly will be at the American University in Beirut presenting lectures and speaking with students about her work.  If you’re around and would like to join us, info on the event is here:  http://www.aub.edu.lb/Events/Pages/EventDetails.aspx?ItemId=2277

This event is immediately following her whirlwind tour of London where she spoke about Drawing Blood in front of sold-out audiences at both Waterstones’ Piccadilly and the Frontline Club.

A photo posted by Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) on Apr 6, 2016 at 5:06pm PDT

Molly also had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Christiane Amanpour of CNN. The video of that interview is available below.

Monday April 4th at 7pm:  Waterstone’s Bookstore.

Little Atoms and Waterstone’s present Molly Crabapple in conversation with acclaimed broadcaster Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism, for an evening of wide-ranging discussion hosted by Little Atoms. Tickets are £5, redeemable against purchase of Drawing Blood. Click here to purchase tickets before they run out!

Wednesday April 6th at 7pm: The Frontline Club

Molly Crabapple will speak Wednesday at the Frotnline Club to reflect on recent projects and to share her personal insight into the use of art as a tool for better understanding and documenting current events. With US presidential primaries now firmly underway, she will discuss her ongoing work on topical home turf issues including policing and the justice system, as well as her experiences covering the effects of conflict across the Middle East.

This event will be chaired by Natasha Lennard, a British-born, New York-based writer of news and political analysis, focusing on justice, power, biopolitics and dissent. She writes regularly for the Intercept, Fusion and Al Jazeera America, and has written for VICE News, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation and Politico, among others. She is editor-at-large at The New Inquiry journal.

Standard tickets are £12.50, Concession tickets are £10. Members pricing differs.
Please click here to read more about the event and purchase your tickets.

Good friend Rich Clark (@zipyrich) is running a Kickstarter to launch his new comic book, STAR. We’re contributing an ORIGINAL PAINTING of his heroine Star. If you’ve ever wanted to own a Molly Crabapple original and support another amazing artist at the same time – NOW IS YOUR CHANCE!

Check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/60289926/star-72-page-series-debut

more info on the panel here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2016/events/event_PP52916