The Great Sinkhole

Art Hazelwood

A hand-bound and hand-printed artbook, with illustrations executed individually and collaged together in such a way as to draw the viewer's eye downward, into the "sinkhole". From the artist's website: '"The Great Sinkhole" is an artist book from Art Hazelwood, drawn from a year and a half of political street posters in opposition to the Trump madness. The images form a broad narrative including the GOP convention, Trump's open embrace of the fascist right in Charlottesville, the response to Hurricane Maria, attacks on public assistance and Playboy models. The Republican elephant is shackled to the president and careening towards some kind of end point, whether an end point of Trump or an end point of democracy is still in question. Volume two is immediately under way.'

Art Hazelwood, in a tradition in printmaking that includes many printmakers over the centuries, tackles politics and politicians head on with little subtlety. "The Great Sinkhole" is perhaps more evident than it was in 2018, when he did originally created this book. A strong social comment and foreboding from Art.

In his article “An Artist for the Moment,” Paul Von Blum wrote: “Hazelwood’s highly detailed woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and book projects make him the legitimate heir of major political artists including Posada, Kollwitz, Daumier, and Goya. His recent works respond in imaginative ways to the present crises and the barbaric “leaders” who have created them…."

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 is 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 works closely with the estates of printmakers Casper Banjo, Patricia C. Bandes, Richard V. Correll, Frank Rowe, Roy Ragle, Daniel Robeski, Charles M. Ware, and William Wolfe, trying 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.