Molly Crabapple

“The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.”

“I grew up in Far Rockaway and then Long Island.”

“I travel so much that when I'm not traveling, I'm just kind of curled up in a ball here, not wanting to leave or see anyone.”

“Working as a model liberated me from ever having to hold a day job. I transitioned from doing that to working full-time as an artist. If you're 19 and living cheap, being an artist model can sustain you.”

“I was involved in Occupy Wall Street as a participant and poster artist. 'Shell Game' is an attempt to do something bigger, to use whatever artistic powers I have to explore the excitements and betrayals of that year.”

“No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.”

“I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're - have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student. I was a brat. If I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself.”

“My real name - my real name is Jennifer Caban.”

“You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.”

“Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'”

“When you're an outsider, you don't have loyalties to anyone, so you can be cruelly honest if need be. The more you get inside, the more you are involved in polite networks of professional coercion that make people less honest.”

“I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.”

“I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.”

“I've become increasingly agoraphobic.”

“Art is much more confined by materials than writing is.”

“Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.”

“Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever.”

“Radicals often suspect beauty of corruption. Uptight fuckers though they sometimes are, they're right in one thing: art alone cannot change the world. Pens can't take on swords, let alone Predator drones. But as disappointment and violence spread, the antidote is a generosity that the best art can still inspire.Art is hope against cynicism, creation against entropy. To make art is an act of both love and defiance. Though I'm a cynic, I believe these things are all we have.”

“When you live in New York and are an artist and are interested in people, you meet a lot of people.”

“I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.”