A Year in Review
In 2024 I wrote a book, and did other things
Thank you so much to the hundreds of monsters who have signed up since I started posting regularly on substack. As an independent artist with no degree and a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. I am truly grateful. If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.
For most of my career, I have been an artist without institutional support. No degrees, no internships, no professors turned mentors, no art grants, no fellowships, no residencies, no none of that. This lack of support, which necessitated clawing every opportunity out of the seeming rock-face of the world’s indifference, made me who I was. “I’ve done it myself”, I’d say, and take pride in the chip on my shoulder. I’d polish it till it shone like a diamond.
The thing about one’s self-image is that eventually, if you live long enough, it ceases to be true. In 2023, after a lifetime without residencies and fellowships, I got the fanciest sort of residency and fellowship there is. The New York Public Library paid me to entomb myself into their wood and marble back rooms and write a book about the Jewish Labor Bund. I did. I spent the first five months of last year surrounded by out of print books and dissolving manuscripts, ferreting out the truth of how this rebel party lived, fought, died, and survived. Outside, on the library steps, protesters denounced the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Often, I’d go down and join them.
I finished my manuscript in May, two days before I left for Yerevan. My name was engraved in gold, and will now live forever on the Cullman Center’s walls. I’m back to being an artist without institutional support, but I remember how sweet it tasted.
I finished the final corrections in a cafe in Tbilisi, once called Tiflis, the stomping grounds of a bank robber who features prominently in my story.
When I got home, I was fucked from the book. Driven a bit crazy by this deep dive into the horrors of the twentieth century (too reminiscent of the horrors of the twenty-first). Beauty saved me. More specifically, the beauty of illustrating Ruby Lal’s biography of Empress Nur Jahan, which gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in the Mughal world I’d worshiped since I was a kid goggling at miniatures at the Met. Our book Tiger Slayer is out for preorder now
As a reward, I learned to do copperplate etchings, like my idol Goya.
I visited Armenia, Georgia, and Athens, my always. I left a piece of myself in Yerevan
Three of my Annotated Muses went to live forever at Francis Kite Club
For the first time, I got to exhibit my work in Puerto Rico
Despite my very important warnings, Sam Altman and his fellow lizard cretins insisted on shoving AI into every crevice of our digital lives. Fortunately, people are questioning the hegemonic belief that every bit of tech, from hi-fructose corn syrup to land mines, is a net good in the world. The Guardian interviewed me as part of a piece they did on the new Luddites.
Tristan, 11, of Norfolk Virginia, also shouted me out in his piece at the National Portrait Gallery, complete with Enoch’s hammer smashed a TV
I denounced AI onstage in Tbilisi, Yerevan (where my hero Jon Lee Anderson interviewed me), and at good old Rhode Island School of Design
I got arrested alongside two hundred Jewish Voices for Peace comrades blockading the New York Stock Exchange to protest the genocide
Trump won. For, In These Times, I drew that fucker for the last fucking time
I didn’t write much this year, save for these two historical pieces about The Bund for The Funambulist and Lux Magazine
When I say “I didn’t write”, that sounds ridiculous. I finished a 430 page book! Yet what I mean, maybe, is that I confined my words to a book that will not be seen by you people until 2026, or I took refuge in history, rather than writing about the personal or the present.
Why did I shut up for so long? Some of it was the genocide in Gaza, which made words taste like ash on my lips, and turned simple statements into absurdities. But it started before that. The gag in my throat, as it were, came from social media, most specifically social justice social media, with its inane pieties, ever-shifting language norms, and penchant for mob harassment — all things that did nothing to stop the Trump train, but sure were good for helping us torture eachother. While being yelled at is part of existing in public, only the social justice milieu demands that, in the name of accountability, you let the yellers inside your head. Get yelled at long enough, for random enough shit, and eventually you grow a little censor of your own. A homunculus, who will sit on your shoulder, lard your prose with caveats, and warn you to never, ever to trust your own heart.
Fuck that.
In November, I finally decided to write what I thought, and I wrote it here, for you.
I have many New Year’s resolutions, but the most important one is to evict that homunculus from my shoulder — to write, right or wrong, with as much flair, as much honesty, as I know how.
Your illustrations are beautiful.
Good luck Molly