Molly Crabapple


Molly Crabapple, born 1983 as Jennifer Caban, is an artist and writer living in New York. She is a contributing editor for VICE and has written for The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, CNN and Newsweek. Her published books include her illustrated memoir Drawing Blood, Discordia on the Greek economic crisis, and the art books Devil in the Details and Week in Hell. She regularly speaks to audiences around the world, at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, The London School of Economics, and Harvard and Columbia University. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Barjeel Art Foundation and the New-York Historical Society.

Early life

Molly Crabapple was born Jennifer Caban in Queens, New York City, New York to a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, who was the daughter of a Belarusian immigrant. Crabapple began drawing at the age of four with guidance from her mother, an illustrator who worked on toy product packaging. At age 12, Crabapple remembers herself as a "snotty goth moppet in a pair of Doc Martens, who blared Hole on her Walkman, drew headless cheerleaders, and read the Marquis de Sade in class". Her school diagnosed her with oppositional defiant disorder and she was expelled from the seventh grade. In high school, Crabapple described herself as "gothy, dorky, and hated". She never liked her given name so she started using the name Molly Crabapple after a boyfriend suggested it reflected her character.
After graduating at the age of 17, she traveled to Europe. In Paris, she was welcomed by George Whitman, the proprietor of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company. After receiving a notebook as a gift she began drawing on a serious basis.

Career

Crabapple went on to work as a life model and a burlesque performer, and modeled for the Society of Illustrators. At the age of 19, she was modeling for SuicideGirls, and responding to ads in Craigslist for nude photographic modeling. Working as a model allowed Crabapple to earn more money than a typical day job and to continue working on her illustrations. She briefly attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, but withdrew during her first year. For four years she worked as the house artist for the Box, a New York City nightclub. Crabapple described her time at the Box as her "artistic coming-of-age".

Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School

After working as an artist's model, Crabapple became disenchanted with the structure of a formal sketch class. She believed that life drawing courses were sufficient for teaching students about anatomy, but the models were treated more like objects rather than like people and the sexual aspects of their modeling were ignored.
In 2005, she and illustrator A. V. Phibes founded Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, a burlesque life-drawing class. At a typical sketching session, artists may drink alcohol whilst sketching burlesque models, and play art games in a venues ranging from bars to art museums. After an artist inquired about starting a Dr. Sketchy's in Melbourne, Australia, it began to spread around the world. As of 2010, there were approximately 150 licensees using the Dr. Sketchy's name.

Comics

Crabapple has contributed her illustrations to a number of comics, often with writer John Leavitt. They worked on Backstage, a webcomic at Act-i-vate that tells the story of how fire eater Scarlett O'Herring was murdered. Scarlett Takes Manhattan, a graphic novel published by Fugu Press, is a prequel to Backstage. Puppet Makers, a steampunk web comic that depicts an alternate history of the industrial revolution and the court of Versailles, was released for digital download by DC Comics. Crabapple also illustrated two Marvel anthologies, Strange Tales vol. 2 and Girl Comics vol. 2.

Occupy Wall Street

In September 2011, Crabapple was living in a studio near Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street protesters had begun to use the Park as a camp to stage their movement, artists began creating posters and Crabapple decided to contribute work and engage in the movement. "Before Occupy I felt like using my art for activist causes was exploitive of activist causes," she told the Village Voice. "I think what Occupy let me do was it allowed me to instead of just donating money to politics or just going to marches, it allowed me to engage my art in politics." Artists and journalists who had come from all over the world to report on the protests were using Crabapple's apartment as an "impromptu salon" for the Occupy movement. In Discordia, British journalist Laurie Penny remembered how "Occupy Wall Street had set up camp two streets away from Crabapple's apartment in Manhattan and we'd just spent a sleepless week documenting arrests. Molly perched at her desk churning out protest posters and handing them to activists to copy and wheat-paste all over the financial district...After three days, the word went out that there was an apartment near the protest camp where you could find hot drinks, basic medical attention and a place to charge your gadgets and file copy. The flat became a temporary sanctuary for stray activists and journalists" "I started doing protest posters," Crabapple recalled. "And in doing these, I found my voice." Author Matt Taibbi called Crabapple "Occupy's greatest artist", noting the use of the "vampire squid" theme in her Occupy artwork. Crabapple, a fan of Taibbi's writing, had read his 2009 Rolling Stone article, "The Great American Bubble Machine". In the article, Taibbi referred to Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." When Crabapple used Taibbi's metaphor as a stencil depicting a vampire squid and released it for anyone to use, it went viral throughout the Occupy movement.
On September 17, 2012, she was among a group of protesters arrested during a rally to mark the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. She wrote about her experience in a CNN opinion piece. In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art acquired "Poster for the May Day General Strike, 2012" for their Occuprint Portfolio. The poster is a collaborative work by Crabapple, John Leavitt, and Melissa Dowell. The poster, which shows a woman holding a match, plays off the words "to strike" as a homage to the London matchgirls strike of 1888.

Art projects

In September 2011 Crabapple engaged in a week long performance art piece title Week in Hell. She locked herself inside a hotel room, covered every inch of the walls with paper, and proceeded to spend the next five days filling every inch of the canvas with illustrations. The project was funded using Kickstarter, garnering 745 backers and over $20k in funds. In pitching the work she explained "I'm interested in what happens when an artist leaves their studio, their cliches, and their comfort zone and draws beyond the limits of their endurance." Every day of the endeavour was live-streamed to all backers. During the week she was continuously visited by friends and fellow artists. A book documenting the project was released March 2012 also titled Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell.
In 2012, Crabapple raised US$30,000 on Kickstarter for The Shell Game, a project involving the creation of ten paintings about the Great Recession. She met her goal in two days and finally raised $64,799. An exhibition was held at Smart Clothes Gallery in NYC, in April 2013. The show ultimately sold out. Uzoamaka Maduka of The American Reader noted that the paintings were reminiscent of political cartoons during the Gilded Age and the Tammany Hall period of American history, which discussed similar subjects like "greed, corruption, and structural treason...around the American ideal, and how that ideal is both undone and constructed by these forces." She regards drawing as “exposure, confrontation, or reckoning. Every line a weapon.”

Illustrated journalism

Starting in 2013 Crabapple began to make trips to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to make sketches recording hearings of Guantanamo military commissions. Her drawings accompanied by written accounts were first published in Vice magazine under the title "It Don't Gitmo Better Than This". Further articles and illustrations were released by Vice and The Paris Review.
Scenes from the Syrian War is a collection illustrated articles serialized in Vanity Fair, made in collaboration with an anonymous source within Syria. Using photos sent via cell phone, Crabapple recreated rare glimpses of daily life in ISIS-occupied Syria. The series so far consists of "Scenes from Daily Life in the De Facto Capital of ISIS", which focuses on the city of Raqqa, "Scenes from Daily Life Inside ISIS-Controlled Mosul", and "Scenes From Inside Aleppo: How Life Has Been Transformed by Rebel Rule".
The Paris Review also featured her sketches of anarchist bikers who provided relief following Hurricane Maria.

Books

In December 2015 Harper Collins published Crabapple's illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood. The book covers her life from a rebellious childhood in Far Rockaway, Queens to her current illustrated journalism projects. Each chapter focuses on a period of her life, notably, her time as a model, her tenure as house artist for the New York and London night club, The Box, and her involvement with the Occupy movement and other post-financial crisis protests.
Drawing Blood was well received in the press, garnering attention and praise from many major news outlets. The New York Times said of it: "The book reads like a notebook of New York, a cultural history of a certain set. Filtered through her eyes, we see 9/11, the aftermath of the crash, Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Sandy and onward... a new model for this century’s young woman".
In May 2018 Penguin Random House published Brothers of the Gun, co-written by Molly Crabapple and Marwan Hisham. The book offers an intimate view into the lives of three friends during the beginning of the 2011 Syrian protests through its descent into civil war and violent chaos. One friend is killed by regime forces, another became a revolutionary Islamist and Hisham, a journalist in exile in Turkey.
Brothers of the Gun received several positive reviews, including one from Angela Davis who said: “A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time...In great personal detail, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple poignantly capture the tumultuous life in Syria before, after, and during the war—from inside one young man’s consciousness.”
In September 2019, Crabapple announced on Twitter she will write a book on the Jewish Labor Bund to be published by Random House.

Animation

In 2010, Crabapple collaborated with Canadian singer Kim Boekbinder and filmmaker Jim Batt on the crowdsourced, stop motion animated film, I Have Your Heart. The film is based on Boekbinder's song, "The Organ Donor's March". They raised $17,000 USD on Kickstarter from over 400 backers in April 2011.
In June of the same year, Crabapple raised US$25,805 from 745 backers on Kickstarter for her "Week in Hell" installation project. Crabapple rented a bare room for five days and covered it from floor to ceiling with blank paper. Using 200 fine tip markers, she covered the paper with her illustrations over the course of one work week. Financial backers were entitled to a live-stream of the work in process, to make suggestions for illustrations, and were given different-sized sections of drawings, depending on the level of financial support they gave.
Crabapple continued her collaborations with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt to create a series of five videos on political topics in 2015 for the media website fusion.net. The videos are composed in a unique combination of live-drawing and animation with voice-over by Crabapple. Each one delves deeply in to a controversial or under-reported issue and provides facts and commentary on the matter.
In 2015, Crabapple, Boekbinder, and Batt collaborated with the Equal Justice Initiative to create the video "Slavery to Mass Incarceration". Crabapple illustrates the animations, paired with Executive Director Bryan Stevenson's narration, which depict the history between mass enslavement and modern-day mass incarceration.
In 2017, Crabapple collaborated with the ACLU, Laverne Cox, Zackary Drucker, and Boekbinder, in making a video about transgender history and resistance.

Other work

Crabapple learned Arabic and traveled to Turkey and Turkish Kurdistan. Near the Syrian border, she was detained by police for a short period. Her impressions of the artistry and culture of the Ottoman Empire in the Near East would come to influence her style and work.
In 2012 Crabapple was one of several artists commissioned by CNN to illustrate the theme of power for a digital art gallery pertaining to the 2012 Presidential election, as well as the fundamental forces that drive debates over controversial issues such as money, health race and gender. Crabapple created the illustration "Big Fish Eat Little Fish Eat Big Fish" for the gallery.

Style and influence

Crabapple uses a crosshatch style of illustration based on Arthur L. Guptill's art technique found in Rendering in Pen and Ink, originally published as Drawing with Pen and Ink. Her style is influenced by Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder , English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley , French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Russian-American artist Zoetica Ebb, American artist Travis Louie, American photographer Clayton Cubitt, and American illustrator Fred Harper.
Der Spiegel called her approach to writing unique, saying she had created a new role, that of the political journalist-artist, and in October 2016 Time magazine named her one of its Next Generation Leaders, "sketching from the front lines of conflicts in the U.S. and around the world," noting that "Her work is a perfect slow-media commentary on our current fast-media climate."

Publications