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Artist: Joshua Brown |
| Exhibition: Tactical Action |
| Date: April 14 2004 - June 10 2004 |
Curator: Lea Rekow
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Bio:
Joshua Brown is a historian, graphic artist, and writer living in New York City. He is executive director of the American Social History Project at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he co-wrote and co-produced the groundbreaking WHO BUILT AMERICA? books, documentaries, and CD-ROMs. Mostly recently he has been executive producer of noted Web projects that collect, inquire about, and reimagine the past, including HISTORY MATTERS, THE LOST MUSEUM, and THE SEPTEMBER 11 DIGITAL ARCHIVE. A Ph.D. from Columbia University and the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other foundations, he is the author of BEYOND THE LINES: PICTORIAL REPORTING, EVERYDAY LIFE, AND THE CRISIS OF GILDED AGE AMERICA and THE HUNGRY EYE, an illustrated historical novel on mid-nineteenth century New York. He has written numerous articles and essays on visual culture and U.S. history, and his cartoons and illustrations appear in popular and scholarly publications as well as digital media.
STATEMENT: Back in the early 1980s, cartoonist Howard Saunders and I briefly worked on a comic strip called Life in Wartime that aimed to tweak some of the pretensions of the labor and academic left. With the beginning of a very non-satirical life during wartime in March 2003, I found it difficult to find anything funny to say, let alone draw. But I also felt compelled to offer an occasional pictorial comment on the situation as it unfolded, assisted by the immediacy, economy, and graphic flexibility of the Internet. Working on paper and then transposing that form to pixels--a publication process very different from the way I'd created buttons, leaflets, stickers, and posters for the antiwar movement in the late '60s and early '70s--my intention was a sort of graphic web log directed to friends and colleagues whom I knew harbored a similar sense of horror, frustration, and marginalization. Rendered quickly, scanned, and then immediately e-mailed and posted online (at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/jbrown/ldw.htmK), the drawings soon moved from my original, more arcane, goal of chronicling the impact of the Iraq war on our everyday lives to address--in both chronological and pictorial terms--the ways war has become the metaphor, means, and justification for the Bush administration's policies as a whole.
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