The Beast of Hate

Art Hazelwood

"The Beast of Hate" was originally designed for the homeless advocacy organization WRAP: Western Regional Advocacy Project, this image was executed as both a fine art print and a poster. The composition retains its topical relevence 18 years after it was created. When will we ever learn?

A creature, part humanoid, part animal, its body composed of institutional buildings, newspapers, bankers, stock brokers, politicians and the like, spouts words of fear and hate over a demolished cityscape.

Art Hazelwood, printmaker, painter, muralist, impresario, educator, independent curator, and political activist, was born in Concord, Massachusetts on May 22, 1961. He studied at the University of California at Santa Cruz and received his B.A. degree in Fine Arts in 1983. After graduation, Hazelwood travelled extensively in Asia, and lived in Vienna and then the American Southwest before settling in San Francisco, California in 1993.

He has been a member of and exhibited with the California Society of Printmakers and the Print Club of Albany. His work has been in numerous exhibitions since his first exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1989. He curated or co-curated the following exhibitions: Three Worlds: Myths Bricks Prints Arias Fuentes Banjo, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco (2009); California in Relief: A History in Wood and Linocut, Hearst Art Gallery (2009); Hobos to Street People: Artists' Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present, travelling exhibition (2009-2012).

In 2008, Hazelwood teamed with Stephen Fredericks of the New York Society of Etchers to organize Art of Democracy, a national coalition of fifty exhibitions across the country that lead up to the presidential elections. That same year Hazelwood worked with Anne Brodzky and DeWitt Cheng to curate the Art of Democracy War and Empire.

Hazelwood is a champion of political causes and fellow artists. He has worked closely with the estates of printmakers Casper Banjo, Patricia C. Brandes, Richard V. Correll, Frank Rowe, Roy Ragle, Daniel Robeski, Charles M. Ware, and William Wolfe, in an effort to keep their legacies alive.

Hazelwood's work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ball State University Art Museum, Yale University Library, Stanford Library Special Collections, New York Public Library, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fresno Museum of Art, Saint Mary's College Museum of Art in Moraga, Lillie M. Kleven Print Collection at the Bemidji State University, the University of Indiana at Bloomington, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles.