A graphic biography of Dorothy Day - American journalist, social activist, anarchist and founding member of the Catholic Worker Movement. Written by Jeffry Odell Korgen and illustrated with 106 pages of my full-color sequential artwork. Set to be published by Paulist Press this Fall!
This series of posters was commissioned by Groundswell in collaboration with The Arab America Association of New York. The designs are based on themes and drawings by a group of young women from the youth collective at AAANY.
This mural was commissioned by Lantern Community Services for Clover Hall, supportive housing for homeless and disabled people in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The design came out of a collaborative art making session with residents. The memorial mural honors residents that passed during the pandemic lockdown.
Fifteen pages of my illustrated journals about working in the jails on Rikers Island published in the Illustrated Cities section of The Guardian
Which Side Are you on? The Story of a Song is full-color illustrated children's book written by George Ella Lyon.
Since the early 2000's I've painted five different pieces for the facade of ABC No Rio the famous squatted community center for arts and activism in Manhattan's Lower East Side. This is the largest of the mural installations and I made it to honor the amazing things they have inside inside like a screen printing lab, a darkroom, the zine library, a computer lab, punk shows every Saturday, art exhibitions and much more.
Welling Court is a street in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, NYC. In 2009 the good folks at Ad Hoc Art teamed up with Welling Court resident Jonathan Ellis to organize the first mural painting event in the neighborhood. Radiating out from the intersection of Welling Court and 30th Ave. hundreds of street and graffiti artists have congregated annually to paint. Many of the neighborhood's residents are vital to making this event so special and welcoming. Shout out to Louie and his family!
This is my fourth Welling Court mural painted in 2015.
Banner/mural commissioned by the National Alliance on Mental Illness for the 2019 Sound Mind Live benefit concert at Rough Trade in Brooklyn
When I sat down to design my fifth Welling Court mural these two images that had been kicking around my head and my studio for months fit perfectly in the spot that I have been repainting every year.
The mural is dedicated to Christopher Denis Kwik, my brother-in-law, who was killed at the beginning of 2016 in Vancouver, Canada. For my wife, the unexpected loss of her brother, has shaken her badly and continues to as she copes with it on a daily basis. Of course it is part of my daily consciousness as well. So I had no doubt that the event informed my imagery.
The quote, “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Is something that Sharon found posted on one of her brother’s social media accounts that she scoured regularly after his death. My brother-in-law’s personal struggles clearly led him to embrace a more compassionate world view.
Welling Court is a street in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, NYC. In 2009 the good folks at Ad Hoc Art teamed up with Welling Court resident Jonathan Ellis to organize the first mural painting event in the neighborhood. Radiating out from the intersection of Welling Court and 30th Ave. hundreds of street and graffiti artists have congregated annually to paint. Many of the neighborhood's residents are vital to making this event so special and welcoming. Shout out to Louie and his family!
This is my third Welling Court mural, painted in 2014. It is part of my Ride to Live project and is based on Dia de Los Muertos sculptures I saw while living in Mexico City. I am very grateful for some late night help that I received from Marcy and Louie on this one. Additionally I produced an edition of screen prints of the same image that you can see and purchase in the prints section of this site.
I painted this banner for the People’s Climate March, which brought together activists for global action against climate change. It took place on Sept. 21st, 2014 in New York City and many other locations around the world. There were an estimated 311.000 participants at the march in Manhattan. It was scheduled to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit which brought many world leaders to NYC two days later.
A black and white photo of the banner was published as a two-page spread in Issue #46 of World War 3 Illustrated Magazine.
“Al Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara” is a Groundswell mural that I led together with Julia Cocuzza in Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail, on Rikers Island in 2017. We collaborated with a group of young women detained there to design and paint the mural.
Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush is a 60 page full-color graphic novel. The story by Luis Alberto Urrea first appeared in a collection of his short stories called Six Kinds of Sky. I worked with Cinco Puntos Press to transform Luis’ amazing writing into a visual narrative. The fictional story is set in the town of Rosario in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. During the visual research phase of my work I traveled there to see the landscape, architecture and people of the town that Luis visited as a boy to spend time with his father’s family. It was well worth the trip and I think that it enriched the images that you see in the book.
In 2014 I designed and created a series of anti-gun violence themed mural panels with students at Intermediate School 109 in East Flatbush Brooklyn. The project was a partnership between NYC Council Member Jumanne Williams and Groundswell Community Mural Project.
The panels pictured here are a“Phase 2” of that project. I designed and painted them myself at Groundswell’s studio. Afterwards they were given to the Council Member’s office, which installed them in a variety of locations around East Flatbush.
In 2018 I collaborated with a small group of young women on this Groundswell mural in the women’s jail on Rikers Island.
This is an eight by twelve-foot mural panel that I painted at the Rockaway Artists Alliance's sTudio 7 Gallery in the Fort Tilden area of the Gateway National Recreation Area. It is part of a Show titled “Forbidden Fruit” that opened on July 2nd 2016 and will be on display Until September 5th. The show includes commissioned artwork by 15 graffiti and street artists and was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and The National Parks Service.
These are some of my recent comics about riding a bike in New York City. To see more visit ridetolive.bike
In August of 2012 the second version of a mural panel that I did for the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute was dedicated at the "Peace Pentagon," home of the War Resistors League and many other social justice organizations at 339 Lafayette St. in Manhattan. A number of years earlier the first version of the mural which I painted at Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY was lost in transit to the city.
The black and white drawing is the original design that was approved by the board of the Institute. They provided a grant for the materials and installation of the mural.
In 2007 while working for Groundswell Community Mural Project in partnership with Transportation Alternatives I produced this mural with Nicole Schulman and a group of teenage artists. It was part of a movement to implement traffic calming measures on traffic corridors in Brooklyn where many pedestrians and cyclists had been killed by drivers.
This comic was commissioned by Ecosocialist Horizons. It is a history of the world from the big bang to the present in six pages. Pages number two, three and four are excerpted here. You can download the complete comic which includes work by many other artists at there site which is linked to above.
These are some bicycle themed prints that I produced with some assistance from my friends at the Bushwick Print Lab. They are a combination of silkscreen line art printed over layers of color created with stenciled spray paint.
I was honored to be invited by Iraq Veterans Against the War and Just Seeds Collective to contribute a print to a portfolio that they produced to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of IVAW. I choose to do a print about Jacob George because I was inspired by the creative way he manifested his protest against the war in Afghanistan. Tragically Jacob took his own life right around the time I was finishing the poster.
While riding around New York City in the early two-thousands I began to notice bicycles painted completely white and chained up alongside the roads. When I took a closer look I saw that some of them had flowers and plaques with names and dates adorning them. The “ghost bikes” were memorials to cyclists that had been killed by drivers of cars and trucks. I began attending annual rides that toured the sites of the memorials to raise awareness about these tragic and unnecessary crashes. This is some of the artwork that came out of meetings I had with families about the loss of their loved ones.
In 2006 I went to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and volunteered with an organization called Common Ground Relief. These excerpted pages include stories from my experience, the people I met and sketches I did during my time there.
