Molly Crabapple: Art on the Frontline
On March 19, 2025, John Cabot University welcomed American artist, writer, and activist Molly Crabapple for the talk “Art & Creativity on the Frontline.” The event was organized and sponsored by the Department of Communication and Media Studies and the Institute for Entrepreneurship, as part of the Spring 2025 Digital Delights and Disturbances (DDD) lecture series.
Crabapple was invited to talk about her 14-year long career, spanning from drawing and designing political commentary in the form of posters, to writing both as a memorialist and a journalist, and the numerous challenges she had to face, as well as her opinion on the changing landscape of art caused by the evolution of AI and freedom-threatening political instability.
She is the author of Brothers of the Gun (One World, 2018), an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham, and the memoir, Drawing Blood (Harper, 2015). As a journalist, she covered the Occupy Wall Street movement protests in 2011, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as well as the destruction of Hurricane Maria on her father’s island, Puerto Rico, in 2017.
Molly Crabapple: Art as a Weapon
In the Aula Magna Regina, Crabapple talked about her experience as a New York born and based artist, from her origins as a night club sketch artist, to her artistic reportage on the frontlines of global conflicts and protests. “I’ve been drawing since I was four,” she said. “I was always obsessed with history – particularly the histories of bad girls and political rebels.”
Crabapple started her career doing illustrated journalism for Occupy Wall Street, the activist movement that held a 59-day long protest in the middle of New York City’s Financial District in 2011. “I was annoyed at the contemptuous and inaccurate treatment that much of the media gave the protesters, and decided to document them myself,” she explained. Crabapple recalled how, sketchbook in tow, she would join the protesters on the street and then design posters for the movement. At one point, she was even arrested. “I wrote an article about the experience,” she said. “This was my first real break as a writer.”
Crabapple talked of the power of art in our changing society – a change brought about, among other things, by the fast-approaching evolution of AI technologies, which is actively threatening the livelihood of artists and illustrators like herself. She underlined how relevant creativity and beauty are in today’s world and in the midst of apparent historical collapse.
“My sketchbook is the only weapon I have,” she stated candidly. Amidst silencing, it is important to bear witness and tell the truth, and as Crabapple explained, she draws the truth she sees in the world. “I don’t want people to be imprisoned or exiled or die of some totally treatable cancer because their health insurance was stripped. I don’t want them to erase our history, mutilate our present, and destroy our futures,” she said. “So I raise my voice. It’s the bare minimum.”
