Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple (born Jennifer Caban; 1983) is an American artist and writer.

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 has remembered herself at age 12 as a "snotty goth moppet in a pair of Doc Martens, who blared Hole on her Walkman, drew headless cheerleaders, and read the Marquis de Sade in class".

Her school diagnosed her with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and she was expelled from the seventh grade.

Crabapple has described herself in high school as "gothy, dorky, and hated".

She never liked her given name, so she started using the name Molly Crabapple after a boyfriend suggested it reflected her character.

She discovered punk rock music at age 12.

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.

Crabapple has called her time at the Box her "artistic coming-of-age".

She characterized the school as being decorated with "fluorescent-lit halls hung with clumsy oil paintings cranked out by the previous semester of failures."

After working as an artist's model, Crabapple became disenchanted with the structure of a formal sketch class.

In 2005, she and illustrator A. V. Phibes founded Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, a burlesque life-drawing class.

At a typical sketching session, artists may drink alcohol while sketching burlesque models, and play art games in a venues ranging from bars to art museums.

After an artist inquired about starting a Dr. Sketchy's in Melbourne, Australia, it began to spread around the world.

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 web comic 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 vol. 2 and Girl Comics vol. 2.

A fan of Taibbi's writing, Crabapple had read his 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, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

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.

As of 2010, there were approximately 150 licensees using the Dr. Sketchy's name.

Crabapple has contributed her illustrations to a number of comics, often with writer John Leavitt.

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.

"I think what Occupy let me do was it allowed me to, instead of just donating money to politics or just going to marches, it 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 remembered how "Occupy Wall Street had set up camp two streets away from Crabapple's apartment in Manhattan and we'd just spent a sleepless week documenting arrests. Molly 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" "I started doing protest posters", Crabapple has recalled.

"And in doing these, I found my voice."

Author Matt Taibbi called Crabapple "Occupy's greatest artist", noting the use of the "vampire squid" theme in her Occupy artwork.

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 is a contributing editor for VICE and has written for a variety of other outlets, as well as publishing books, including an illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood (2015), Discordia (with Laurie Penny) on the Greek economic crisis, and the art books Devil in the Details and Week in Hell (2012).

Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Barjeel Art Foundation and the New-York Historical Society.