Molly Crabapple “The Chair Series”

Postmasters Gallery

[Image: Molly Crabapple "Mia" (2023)]

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Just two humans, pigment, junk cardboard, eye and hand.

People from all walks of life had their portraits painted by Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer known for documenting extremes: from nightclubs to war zones. The Chair Series is Crabapple’s most personal project. Seated in the same chair for the intimate one-on-one sessions in her apartment the sitters and the artist share more than the space. The result is a group of extraordinary images at once loud and poetic.

I painted this series from between the winter of 2022 and the summer of 2023, when the city had finally crawled out from under COVID and all I wanted was the physical presence of other humans. For each portrait, I sat a friend or stranger on a pink velveteen chair that belonged to my great grandmother Rose and drew them for the next five hours. I painted on old packing cardboard, and used any and all materials within grasping distance — acrylic, gouache, markers, ink, dye, pastel — and tried to get the softness of the skin, the fall of their bodies, the iron in their eyes. These are fire eaters and sex workers, philosophers and poets, all sprawled out like some opium den dinner party from a New York of my imaginings. There’s no tech - even the music I played while I painted was on vinyl - and no reference photos. Just two humans, pigment, junk cardboard, eye and hand.

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Molly Crabapple, Asad, 2023 Molly Crabapple, Nermeen, 2023
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose influences include Toulouse Lautrec, Diego Rivera, and Goya’s The Disasters of War. Nominated for a National Book Award and three Emmys, her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University, and the New York Historical Society.

Crabapple has reported with words and art on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lebanese snipers, Guantanamo Bay, the US-Mexican border, Pennsylvania prisoners, New York cabbies, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Her work was published in The New York Times, The Guardian, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker.

Crabapple is the co-author of Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham.

As an award-winning animator, she has pioneered a new genre of live-illustrated journalism, collaborating with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jay Z, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU.