Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple studied at Fashion Institute of Technology. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is visual arts, illustration and creative and professional writing. Work by Molly Crabapple is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art and Print Collection.

• Name — Molly Crabapple • Birth Name — Jennifer Caban • Born — 1983 • Birthplace — Queens, New York, U.S. • Education — Fashion Institute of Technology • Movement — Surrealism, steampunk • Known for — Fine art, illustration, writing • Notable Works — Shell Game (2013), Week in Hell (2012), Drawing Blood (2015), Brothers of the Gun (2018), Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026)

Molly Crabapple was born Jennifer Caban in 1983 in Queens, New York City, New York, to a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, who was the daughter of a Belarusian immigrant. Crabapple began drawing at the age of four with guidance from her mother, an illustrator who worked on toy product packaging. Crabapple's school diagnosed her with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and she was expelled from the seventh grade. She never liked her given name, so she started using the name Molly Crabapple after a boyfriend suggested that it reflected her disposition. After graduating from high school at age 17, Crabapple traveled to Europe. In Paris, she was welcomed by George Whitman, the proprietor of the English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company. After receiving a notebook as a gift, she began drawing on a serious basis.

Crabapple went on to work as a life model and a burlesque performer, and modeled for the Society of Illustrators. At age 19, she was modeling for SuicideGirls and responding to Craigslist ads for nude photographic modeling. Crabapple earned more money modeling than at a typical day job and continued working on her illustrations. She briefly attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, withdrawing before completing her first year. For four years she worked as the house artist for the Box, a New York City nightclub.

• Illustration — Crabapple (right) at the ACT-I-VATE panel at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival Crabapple has contributed her illustrations to a number of comics, often with writer John Leavitt. They worked on Backstage (2008), a webcomic at Act-i-vate that tells the story of how fire eater Scarlett O'Herring was murdered. Scarlett Takes Manhattan (2009), a graphic novel published by Fugu Press, is a prequel to Backstage. Puppet Makers (2011), a steampunk webcomic that depicts an alternate history of the Industrial Revolution and the court of Versailles, was released for digital download by DC Comics. Crabapple also illustrated two Marvel anthologies, Strange Tales volume 2 and Girl Comics volume 2.

In September 2011, Crabapple was living in a studio near Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street protesters had begun to use the park as a camp for their movement, artists began creating posters, and Crabapple contributed work and engaged in the movement. "Before Occupy I felt like using my art for activist causes was exploitive of activist causes," she told The Village Voice. "Occupy [...] allowed me to engage my art in politics." Artists and journalists who had come from all over the world to report on the protests used Crabapple's apartment as an "impromptu salon" for the Occupy movement. In Discordia (2012), British journalist Laurie Penny recounts how Crabapple "perched at her desk churning out protest posters and handing them to activists to copy and wheat-paste all over the financial district [...] After three days, the word went out that there was an apartment near the protest camp where you could find hot drinks, basic medical attention and a place to charge your gadgets and file copy. The flat became a temporary sanctuary for stray activists and journalists." Author Matt Taibbi called Crabapple "Occupy's greatest artist," noting the use of the "vampire squid" theme in her Occupy artwork. Crabapple had read Taibbi's 2009 Rolling Stone article "The Great American Bubble Machine," in which Taibbi called Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity". When Crabapple used Taibbi's metaphor as a stencil depicting a vampire squid and released it for anyone to use, it went viral throughout the Occupy movement. On September 17, 2012, Crabapple was among a group of protesters arrested during a rally to mark the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. She wrote about her experience in a CNN opinion piece. In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art acquired "Poster for the May Day General Strike, 2012" for its Occuprint Portfolio. The poster is a collaborative work by Crabapple, John Leavitt, and Melissa Dowell. It shows a woman holding a match, playing off the word "strike" as an homage to the London matchgirls' strike of 1888.

In September 2011, Crabapple engaged in a week-long performance art piece, Week in Hell. She locked herself inside a hotel room, covered the walls with paper, and spent the next five days filling the paper with illustrations. The project was funded on Kickstarter, garnering 745 backers and over $20,000. In pitching the work, she wrote: "I'm interested in what happens when an artist leaves their studio, their cliches, and their comfort zone and draws beyond the limits of their endurance." Every day of the endeavor was live-streamed to backers. During the week she was continuously visited by friends and fellow artists. A book documenting the project, Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell, was released in March 2012. In 2012, Crabapple raised $30,000 on Kickstarter for The Shell Game, a project involving the creation of ten paintings about the Great Recession. She met her goal in two days, ultimately raising $64,799. An exhibition was held at New York City's Smart Clothes Gallery in April 2013. The show sold out. Uzoamaka Maduka of The American Reader wrote that the paintings were reminiscent of political cartoons during the Gilded Age and the Tammany Hall period of American history, which depicted similar subjects, like "greed, corruption, and structural treason [...] around the American ideal, and how that ideal is both undone and constructed by these forces."

In 2010, Crabapple collaborated with Canadian singer Max Fractal and filmmaker Jim Batt on the crowdsourced, stop-motion animated film I Have Your Heart. The film is based on Fractal's song "The Organ Donor's March". They raised $17,000 on Kickstarter from over 400 backers in April 2011. Crabapple continued her collaboration with Fractal and Batt to create a series of five videos on political topics in 2015 for the media website fusion.net. The videos combine live-drawing and animation with voice-over by Crabapple. Each one delves into a controversial or underreported issue and provides facts and commentary on it. In 2015, Crabapple, Boekbinder, and Batt collaborated with the Equal Justice Initiative to create the video "Slavery to Mass Incarceration". Crabapple illustrated the animations, paired with executive director Bryan Stevenson's narration, which depict the history of mass enslavement and modern-day mass incarceration. In 2016, Crabapple animated a video produced and narrated by Jay-Z, "The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail", which presents a critical view of how federal drug laws instituted by the Nixon administration in 1971, as well as those implemented by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, targeted the Black community, resulting in the explosion of the nation's prison population. In 2017, Crabapple collaborated with Fractal, the ACLU, Laverne Cox, and Zackary Drucker on a video about transgender history and resistance.

Crabapple learned Arabic and traveled to Turkey and Turkish Kurdistan. Near the Syrian border, she was briefly detained by police. Her impressions of the artistry and culture of the Ottoman Empire in the Near East influenced her style and work. In 2012, Crabapple was one of several artists CNN commissioned to illustrate the theme of power for a digital art gallery pertaining to the 2012 presidential election, as well as the forces that drive debates over controversial issues such as money, health, race, and gender. Crabapple created the illustration "Big Fish Eat Little Fish Eat Big Fish" for the gallery.

In December 2015, HarperCollins published Crabapple's illustrated autobiography, Drawing Blood. Most of the book covers the period in her early and mid-20s, in which she supported herself by burlesque dancing and nude modeling for amateur photographers in rented hotel rooms and on the softcore porn website SuicideGirls. Her experiences of the September 11 attacks, the economic expansion of the early 2000s, the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and Hurricane Sandy are also covered in the book, which Deb Olin Unferth, reviewing it for The New York Times, said, "reads like a notebook of New York, a cultural history of a certain set." The book emphasizes how these events were interpreted by Crabapple through her art, which includes original illustrations made specifically for the book. As Unferth observed: "What makes the book captivating and sets it apart from other descriptions of these much-reported events is how it is essentially one long glorious description of what Crabapple drew and why she drew it." Brian Castner, reviewing the memoir for The Daily Beast, said that "Drawing Blood might be the sexiest thing you read this year," calling the book "a remarkable read, dripping in old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock and roll [...] a rewarding creation story, the tale of how Jennifer Caban, a shy and shame-filled Puerto Rican-Jewish girl from Queens, became Molly Crabapple: empowered sex-positive feminist, resident-artist of a worldwide movement, and producer of murals that have been compared to Diego Rivera, Bruegel the Elder, and Cirque du Soleil." In May 2018, Penguin Random House published Brothers of the Gun, co-written (and illustrated) by Crabapple and Marwan Hisham. The book offers an intimate view into the lives of three friends during the beginning of the 2011 Syrian protests through its descent into civil war and violent chaos. One friend is killed by regime forces, another becomes a revolutionary Islamist, and Hisham becomes a journalist in exile in Turkey. Brothers of the Gun received several positive reviews, including a blurb from Angela Davis, who wrote: "A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time...In great personal detail, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple poignantly capture the tumultuous life in Syria before, after, and during the war—from inside one young man’s consciousness." In September 2019, it was reported that Crabapple was working on a book on the Jewish Labor Bund, to be published by Random House. The book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, was released in April 2026 and debuted in fourth position on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover non-fiction.

• Dr. Sketchy's Official Rainy Day Colouring Book (2006) • Scarlett Takes Manhattan (2009) • Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell (2012) • Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 2: Devil in the Details (2012) • Drawing Blood (2015) • Brothers of the Gun (2018) • Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026)