September 13, 1983

Matt Taibbi calls her “Occupy’s greatest artist.” Here is a giveaway once available at a gallery show:

Molly Crabapple (September 13, 1983) is the artist. It said:

Part of the energy Crabapple has generated comes from the way that she has industriously created an audience for herself, tapping into a public hungry for art that is accessible, smart, and a few steps to the left of traditional Chelsea fare ....She’s collaborated with radical burlesque dancers and lefty journalists...She has a freewheeling column in Vice. Her story is fascinating: In bubble-era New York, she became the in-house artist for the famously extravagant nightclub The Box. Inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and his absinthe-injected sceneogaphy, she got to chronicle I-banker decadence at its most extreme, and at close range. “I drew my beloved performers as gods,” she explained recently. “Customers were coke snorting pigs.”

Then, when Occupy Wall Street broke out in 2011, she found herself sucked in — almost literally since her apartment was nearby. Her skills chronicling live-wire performers now went to work depicting the protestors in Zuccotti Park, an act she considered a kind of guerrilla independent journalism, showing a crowd more multilayered than that depicted by the media.....

Crabapple has traveled.... to various political crisis zones, illustrating the book “Discordia.” ... The painting “Syntagma Athena,” for instance, is her take on her sojourn in crisis-wracked Greece, filled with political references and in-jokes. A marble bust of a woman at its center is defaced with graffiti slogans torn from the anarchist campouts of Athens. Literal fat cats, representing eurocrat officialdom, syphon coins from the people. The feisty little yellow pooches who represent the Greek protesters are a reference to “Loukanikos,” a street dog who became a popular symbol for its willingness to stand at the front line at marches, defending activists from the cops.

Matt Taibbi, right again, as usual.