[EVENT] Cover Art / Other Art

[EVENT] Cover Art / Other Art [EVENT] Cover Art / Other Art Join artists Tabitha Arnold, Molly Crabapple, and Matt Rota for an exhibit exploring the intersection between their creative and commercial work. “Cover Art/Other Art” is an exhibit of three working artists at the Puffin Foundation’s Brooklyn location. The exhibit explores the intersection between “creative work” and “commercial work.” Tabitha Arnold, Molly Crabapple, and Matt Rota are well established artists working in illustrative journalism, but each of them has an expansive creative practice outside of their commissioned work. This exhibition gives viewers a sense of their range while highlighting some of the important independent media that the Puffin Foundation supports. It asks what threads bind creative and commercial work together, and considers what it means to be a “working artist” when creative livelihoods are increasingly under threat from unregulated AI. Co-presented with Dissent, the exhibit includes drawings, prints, and zines by Matt Rota; paintings and journals by Molly Crabapple; and the punch needle tapestries of Tabitha Arnold. Opening: Saturday October 10th 4pm -6pm On view: Sunday, October 11 to Sunday, December 13 Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Puffin Foundation, 227 5th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn Tabitha Arnold is an artist born and deeply rooted in Chattanooga, Tennessee who tried to study painting in Philadelphia until an Ann Hamilton exhibit freed her to abandon the medium and teach herself tapestry weaving. In 2019, she began organizing a union at her workplace, a profound experience that called for making tapestries about labor. Using a rug-punching tool as a makeshift embroidery needle, Arnold borrows images from Bible Belt spirituality, social realism, and pre-modern art to create monuments for the working class. Her practice comes out of a generational revival of union organizing in the United States, and the tapestries tie this moment into a long lineage of historical class struggle, especially in the Appalachian South. She exhibits her tapestries at union halls and labor conventions, along with traditional venues. Her pieces are in museum collections and on the walls of union-loving homes, but her biggest flex is a solidarity tapestry at the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) in Havana. Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Toulouse Lautrec, Diego Rivera and Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War.’ She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, Columbia University and the New York Historical Society. Her animated films have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Molly got her start as the house artist for New York’s most notorious nightclub. She became a journalist sketching the frontlines of Occupy Wall Street before covering, with words and art, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lebanese snipers, Guantanamo Bay, the U.S.-Mexican border, Pennsylvania prisoners, New York cabbies, Greek refugee camps, and the ravages of hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She is the first artist at large for In These Times. Matt Rota is a graduate of The Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of Visual Arts, Matt has worked with clients including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Pentagram, Harper’s, Penguin Books, The Transnational Institute, ProPublica, the Los Angeles Times, The International Center for Investigative Journalism, Foreign Policy, The Equal Justice Initiative, American Scholar, the Criterion Collection, the New Republic, and many others. Over the past ten years, he has taught illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art and The School of Visual Arts. Matt has written two books on drawing, has an extensive exhibition career, and is on the board of the historic Artists Equity Association. His work is regularly included in the annuals American Illustration, and Society of Illustrators. Matt is represented by the agency Illustration Zone.