The Art of the Book
Sixth Annual Exhibition of Handmade Books,
Altered Books and Book Related Works |
Art Hazelwood artist, impresario and instigator lives in San Francisco. He tries to integrate being an artist with curating and political activism.
He completed two ceramic tile murals in 2009, one, a memorial to Arnett Watson, a homeless rights activist, the other in a program to aid children of incarcerated parents at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco. His show of prints, Hubris Corpulentus, about the current US wars, traveled to several venues around the country from 2003 to 2006. He created three large scale book projects with print publisher Eastside Editions in San Francisco. Each of these book projects took two years to complete. His prints are in several public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, RSDI Museum, Stanford Special Collections Library, Yale Special Collections Library.
Since 1993 he has worked with several homeless rights organizations creating artwork for street newspapers, creating posters and helping to organize fundraising events.
In 2009 he curated three major exhibitions. The first, a three year traveling exhibition which examines artists’ responses to homelessness from the New Deal to the present, opened at the California Historical Society in San Francisco. He also curated a history of the relief print in Northern California; nearly one hundred woodcuts, linocuts and wood engravings over a one hundred year span, at the Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. And he curated a retrospective of slain artist Casper Banjo at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco.
In 2008, together with Stephen Fredericks of the New York Society of Etchers, he organized the Art of Democracy a national coalition, producing more than one hundred political posters and bringing together more than fifty political art shows taking place all over the country leading up to the presidential elections. He has organized more than 20 group exhibitions and curated shows for individual artists including retrospectives of several artists including William Wolff, Roy Ragle, Casper Banjo, David Avery, Frank Rowe and Richard Correll (a two person show) and Patricia Cosper Brandes.
Tora Bora
Tora Bora is a reverse engineered opera. The Seventeenth Century etcher Jacques Callot’s illustrations of scenes from operas inspired the thought—what if all that remained of an opera were etchings from a few scenes? How, for example, would the Magic Flute be reconstructed from that? With this in mind Art Hazelwood and Klaus-Ullrich Rötzscher began this collaboration.
Art Hazelwood engraved the six scenes from the opera Tora Bora. Tora Bora is the name of a mountain cave complex at the center of Afghan contemporary history. The CIA funded the expansion of the caves there to help the Mujahideen fight the Soviets. The Taliban used them, and it was Osama Bin Laden’s last known address, from where he escaped capture by the US. Even now poppy production and Taliban activity is rampant in this rugged mountain area twenty miles from the Pakistan border.
The opera is presented in a fold out stage with screen printed covers. The viewer moves through the various scenes of the opera while reading the storyline and lyrics in an accompanying booklet and using seven puppets to enact the scenes. Should a full scale opera appear it will be staged on a larger stage.
Fold out boxed opera with seven puppets, six engravings and a letterpress booklet of storyline, in an edition of twenty.
12.18 x 13.18 x 1.25
$1800
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