Nicole Schulman
march 8 - april 28, 2007
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
-Bertolt Brecht
New paintings and original comic art by Nicole Schulman: artist, cartoonist and editor of "World War 3 Illustrated" and "Wobblies!: A Graphic History".
Nicole Schulman’s work straddles the divide between high and low in the art world. In the chunky middle ground between the two, there is a place where political action, fine art, and comic illustration meet.
Schulman’s chosen medium is scratch board, a technique where drawings are scratched into ink painted over a thin layer of white clay laid over poster board or stiff paper. The marriage of this technique and Schulman’s working of it sends her chosen subjects into relief.
Her mastery of scratch board gives way to expressionistic depiction's of real life struggles. Throwing the plight of her subjects into high relief, Schulman adds the deft touch of humanity that marks all great works of art. Her work is a visual translation of the innate beauty of suffering and struggle that sometimes leads to triumph, sometimes to tragedy.
A native New Yorker, this radical artist's work has been exhibited in New York, Ravenna, Tel Aviv, and Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, as well as squat house walls across the US, Asia, and Europe. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, has adorned placards and banners at antiwar demonstrations and union picket lines, published in The New York Times and World War 3 Illustrated (the longest running radical comics zine in the U.S.), and pirated by Greek Anarchists. With Paul Buhle she edited and contributed to Wobblies, a pictorial account of the struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and is coeditor for the activist semiannual World War 3 Illustrated. Featured in this exhibition are original works from World War 3 Illustrated #37: Unnatural Disasters
Mary-Beth Shine
