The World Is Yours, the World Is Mine
Ink and gouache on prepared paper
The Many Faces of Islam
Dry pigment, gouache, gold leaf, tea wash on prepared paper
Born in Pakistan, SHAHZIA SIKANDER received her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts in Lahore. Sikander’s breakthrough work received national critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Shakir Ali and Haji Sharif Awards for excellence in miniature painting, subsequently launching the medium into the forefront of NCA’s program, and bringing international recognition to this medium within contemporary art practices. Sikander moved to the United States in 1993 to pursue her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Informed by South Asian, American, feminist, and Muslim perspectives, Sikander has developed a unique, critically charged visual iconography to explore ideas of language, trade and empire, and migration. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2006) and the State Department Medal of Arts (2012), Sikander has been the subject of major international exhibitions around the world and has participated in more than four hundred group shows and international art forums.
Your Sacred American Rights Bingo
Ink and watercolor
MIMI POND is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. Her most recent books are the semiautobiographical graphic novels Over Easy and The Customer is Always Wrong, about her late-1970s Oakland waitressing career. She has created comics for newyorker.com, the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications. She has also written for television: her credits include the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” and episodes for the television shows Designing Women and Pee-wee’s Playhouse. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the painter Wayne White.
Guantánamo, ERF Team: Macing Prisoner in Eye (detail)
Charcoal on paper
Guantánamo, ERF Team: Waterboarding Prisoner
Charcoal on paper
SUSAN CRILE’s paintings and works on paper have been addressing war and its outcomes since 1991: the burning oil fields of Kuwait, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo Bay. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others, and has been exhibited in many museums in the United States and Europe, including the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, the Phillips Collection, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. She has had over fifty one-person shows. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and two Residency grants, to the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and to the American Academy in Rome. She is a professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she has been on the faculty since 1982. Currently, Crile is working on a series of works on paper using the Statue of Liberty as a metaphor for our times, continuing work on the BP oil spill, and starting investigation into the US prison system. Visit her website at www.susancrile.com.
My father told me about the trade canoes that came up river to our reservation bearing trade goods, such things as whiskey laced with lead and U.S. government issued blankets smeared with small pox germs, moldy flour and wormy beef, part of the U.S. government’s genocide plan for its Native population. My father remembered the men who lived through the small pox plague because they were marked by baldness. I’ve been drawing and painting trade canoes lately because there’s much to say about the times we are living in and how we’re being deceived by our government. I should mention Coyote is part of our creation story; s/he helped Amotken turn the lights on.
Starry Starry Night
Trade Canoe: Forty Days and Forty Nights
Mixed media: oil, acrylic, collage, and oil crayon
JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH calls herself a cultural arts worker. She uses humor and satire to examine myths, stereotypes, and the paradox of American Indian life in contrast to the consumerism of American society. Her work is philosophically centered by her strong traditional beliefs and political activism. Smith is internationally known as an artist, curator, lecturer, printmaker, and professor. She was born at St. Ignatius Mission on her reservation and is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art, and the University of New Mexico. Her work is in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent awards include a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to archive her work; the 2011 ArtTable Artist Award; Moore College Visionary Woman Award for 2011; induction into the National Academy, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, New Mexico, 2012; the Switzer Distinguished Artist Award for 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award 2014; Honorary Degree, Salish Kootenai College, Montana, 2015; Alumni Achievement Award, Framingham State University, Massachusetts, 2016.
Our Cuntry Needs You
Photograph
Tic-Tac-Toe
Photograph
Deep Frost
Photograph
MARILYN MINTER lives and works in New York. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2009; La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Ceutí, Murcia, Spain, in 2009; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio, in 2010; and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, in 2011. Her video “Green Pink Caviar” was exhibited in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 for over a year, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York. In 2006, Minter was included in the Whitney Biennial, and, in collaboration with Creative Time, she installed billboards all over Chelsea in NYC. In 2013, she was featured in Riotous Baroque, an exhibition that originated at the Kunsthaus Zürich and traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao. In 2015, her retrospective Pretty/Dirty opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and on to the Orange County Museum of Art. Pretty/Dirty opened at the Brooklyn Museum in November 2016.
Island of Tears . . .
Oil pastel on “JR” photos
Inset panels of Island of Tears: India ink with Photoshop digital color
Island of Hope!
Oil pastel on “JR” photos
Ghost of Ellis Island
Oil pastel on “JR” photos
ART SPIEGELMAN has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus. He continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives after in Maus II. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and went on to study art and philosophy before becoming part of the underground comix subculture of the 1960s and ’70s. He founded Raw, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly, in 1980. In 2005 Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People; in 2006 he was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame; in 2007 he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France; in 2011 he won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival; in 2015 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His project WORDLESS!, a multimedia look at the history of the graphic novel, had its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House in October 2013 and its US premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 2014. His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993 to 2003.
Look Away
Loving in Black & White
Oil on canvas
BEVERLY MCIVER is widely acknowledged as a significant presence in contemporary American art and has charted a new direction as an African American female artist. She is committed to producing art that examines racial, gender, social, and occupational identity. McIver was named one of the “Top Ten in Painting” in Art in America in 2011. Raising Renee, a feature-length documentary produced in association with HBO that tells the story of the impact of McIver’s promise to care for her sister when their mother dies, was nominated for an Emmy Award and is now streaming on Amazon Prime. McIver’s work is in such collections as the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the NCCU Museum of Art, the Asheville Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the Mint Museum, among others. McIver has received grants and awards including the 2017 Rome Prize Fellowship, a 2017 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship from Harvard University, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Award, a Distinguished Alumni Award from Pennsylvania State University, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Creative Capital grant.
The Ugliest American Alphabet
Pen and ink on Ingram animation bond with digital color
ERIC ORNER’s graphic fiction has appeared in publications including Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics, BuzzFeed, and McSweeney’s. His comic The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green is anthologized in several books from St. Martin’s Press and Northwest Press and was adapted into a feature film in 2006. Currently, Eric is hard at work on a graphic biography of Barney Frank, to be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in 2019.
Vote Hillary
Silkscreen on Stonehenge 320-gram paper
DEBORAH KASS is an artist whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture, and the self. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard, as well as other museums and private collections. Kass’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Her monumental sculpture OY/YO in Brooklyn Bridge Park became an instant icon, appearing on the front page of the New York Times, currently installed at the North 5th Street Pier in Williamsburg. Kass was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame in 2014. Her print Vote Hillary was an official commemorative print for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Little House on the Prairie Holding Company LLC
Acrylic on paper
DAVID STOREY is an artist who lives and works in New York. He makes paintings, drawings, and prints that compound and condense the interaction of image and abstraction. His work is in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, in addition to residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He currently teaches at Fordham University in New York.
Acknowledgments
Occasionally, what begins as a simple idea to do something worthwhile can become big and messy and incredibly difficult. When David Falk and I had the idea for this book we were (and remain) altruistic, though the process of making it a reality was more than either of us imagined. As someone very smart once said, “It takes a village,” and it did. There were innumerable obstacles and more than a few times when the struggles of working with so many people in such a short amount of time came close to overwhelming. What always saved us, what propelled us forward, was that something—someone—always stepped up to the plate and made it all worthwhile and meaningful once again.
We chose the anniversary of the Women’s March as our publication date because it was, like this collection, a coming together of people, a way to say “No, we will not accept this!” Hundreds of marches took place across the country, and hundreds more marches bloomed around the world in support.
To see an ambitious literary and art project like this to completion—in an utterly unreasonable amount of time (a matter of months!)—took a tremendous group effort. What you now hold in your hands is the result of that hard work and creative energy, which would not have been possible without the help of so many people we’d like to thank, who willingly (eagerly even!) signed up for this Herculean task.
At Simon & Schuster, we wish to thank:
Susan Moldow and Tara Parsons, for signing off on the idea of the book when it was still just an idea. Thanks to David’s assistant and publishing manager, Isabel DaSilva, for shepherding the great many piecemeal parts through and on to production, and meticulously keeping track. Thank you to Tamara Arellano, Laura Cherkas, and Josh Cohen for the breakneck yet ever wise copyediting. Thank you to Erich Hobbing for the elegant and thoughtful interior design, and to Kathryn Barrett for her diligence. We’re grateful for Mike Kwan and Anna Campbell, for masterfully guiding the book through the production process. To Lourdes Lopez, Emily Remes, and Elisa M. Rivlin, thank you for your wise counsel. Thanks to Amanda Mulholland and Julie Ficks, for keeping all the managing editorial trains running on time (and occasionally cracking the whip on us). Thank you, Paul Chong and Angela Hsiao, for (kindly) demanding planning. Thank you, Cherlynne Li, Daniel Rembert, and Ervin Serrano (with Jasper Johns!), for the timeless cover design and the numerous “final” iterations. Thanks to Shida Carr and Brian Belfiglio, for their keen and ardent publicity efforts. And very special thanks to the always creative and clever Meredith Vilarello and Kelsey Manning for helping this special book find its audience.
So many people joined in with suggestions and help, in particular: Noreen Tomassi, executive director of the Center for Fiction, and Elaina Richardson, President of Yaddo; Richard Shebairo, Eamon Dolan, Craig Popelars, and Jenna Johnson, who generously offered ways and means to contact various people. Many, many thanks to the unflagging and incredibly generous Heidi Pitlor. I would also like to thank Todd Shuster and Jane von Mehren, who not only offered suggestions and help whenever possible but firmly believed in this project.
Looking back on our early correspondence for this project, one of our very first brain-pickings was to Carla Gray. Much too soon after, the world lost a truly extraordinary evangelist of books, a tireless advocate of authors, and a dear friend of booksellers and publishing people across the country. Thank you, Carla.
Of course this could not have happened without the extraordinary people at the American Civil Liberties Union: beginning with Michele M. Moore, along with the ACLU’s tireless leader, Anthony Romero, who despite his incredibly demanding schedule has been as smart and compassionate as his words and deeds, and Stacy Sullivan, Danielle Silber, and Eric Vieland, who took the time to hear out a couple of guys who wanted to use words and pictures to make a beautiful and enduring statement about what’s good and necessary and must be preserved in our country, and then helped them clear the path.
Naturally there would be no book without the many writers and artists who donated their time and talent, and for that we thank them and praise their work and their generosity of spirit.
To the many friends and family of David Falk and Jonathan Santlofer, who offered advice, comfort, and their shoulders in times of stress, we cannot thank you enough—you know who you are.
In the end, this book is a true partnership between David and myself. We worked together to make an idea into something real and tangible. It is what we believe and what all of us must do to move forward—work together for something better—and we hope the book conveys that message.
JONATHAN SANTLOFER was born in Manhattan, grew up on Long Isla
nd, and though he has lived in many places, both in the United States and abroad, he always comes back to New York City, one of the most culturally and racially diverse cities in the world.
Both sets of Jonathan’s grandparents were immigrants. His father’s parents fled Poland to escape the Nazis and were forever grateful for their lives in America. His mother’s parents, also Eastern European immigrants, met in a New York City shirt factory, got married, and raised six children in a crowded Bronx railroad flat. They taught their children and grandchildren to be kind, caring, and inclusive and they never stopped believing in equality for everyone or gave up on the American dream.
It Occurs to Me That I Am America Page 39