Gaceta Callejera: America, Open for Business by Art Hazelwood

Gaceta Callejera: America, Open for Business by Art Hazelwood

Gaceta Callejera: America, Open for Business

Art Hazelwood

Title

Gaceta Callejera: America, Open for Business

 
Artist

Art Hazelwood

  1961 - PRESENT (biography)
Year
2020  
Technique
color screenprint 
Image Size
18 5/8 x 12 3/8" image size 
Signature
pencil, lower right 
Edition Size
2 of 18  
Annotations
Text within image: Gaceta Callejera. / America, Open for Business 
Reference
 
Paper
sturdy cream wove 
State
published 
Publisher
artist 
Inventory ID
ARHA219 
Price
SOLD
Description

In his article “An Artist for the Moment,” written during the Covid epidemic, scholar Paul Von Blum describes this screenprint by Art Hazelwood: "'America, Open for Business' depicts Trump and his capitalist cronies demanding the reopening of American commerce, despite the overwhelming human cost, with now more than 150,000 dead and counting. At the top of the composition is a large money-bag figure, revealing the real interests at work: large corporations pulling the puppet strings of Trump and the captive Republican Party. The vulture on top is reminiscent of the biting 19th century cartoons of Thomas Nast. This work, like the others, is unapologetically unsubtle, a historic feature of effective political art."

Now, in his second go-round he has found favor with America's richest billionaires and the above sentiments are even more poignent. "Open for Business" indeed!!

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 works 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, attempting 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.