The Tipping Point is a linen-bound, forty-four page book featuring twenty-nine screenprints and an interactive pull tab. It was conceived, drawn, and printed in 2020 by American artist, Art Hazelwood, and is pencil signed and editioned 3/25 on the colophon. The pages were printed on ivory wove paper and the design and binding of the book were the work of Asa Nakata. The book measures 12 x 9 x 1-3/8 inches.
Hazelwood described his book: “Conceived just before the pandemic this artist book of twenty nine screenprint images spanning forty four pages was put into book form with the skill and design of Asa Nakata. The moneybag-headed capitalist, the one-eyed pyramid dollar, and the Klan mask are used here as shorthand for the destructive powers arrayed against the people and the planet at this critical moment of economic inequality, racist xenophobia and environmental disaster. But a growing alternative power is also at play. It's a power that can challenge the fascists if only the sleeping giant can arise to overthrow these forces and create a world that embraces all life. The big punch in the end is a moveable guillotine - leading to hours of fun decapitating capital. Tipping Point uses satire to make it’s point but the goal is to move towards a vision of transformation, a tipping point to something better.”
Art Hazelwood, printmaker, painter, muralist, impresario, educator, independent curator, and political activist, was born in Concord, Massachusetts on May 22, 1961. He studied at the University of California at Santa Cruz and received his B.A. in Fine Arts in 1983. After graduation, Hazelwood travelled extensively in Asia, and lived in Vienna and then the American Southwest before settling in San Francisco, California in 1993.
He is a member of and exhibited with the California Society of Printmakers and the Print Club of Albany. His work has been in numerous exhibitions since his first exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1989. He curated or co-curated the following exhibitions: Three Worlds: Myths Bricks Prints Arias Fuentes Banjo, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco; California in Relief: A History in Wood and Linocut, Hearst Art Gallery; Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present, travelling exhibition. In 2008, Hazelwood teamed with Stephen Fredericks of the New York Society of Etchers to organize Art of Democracy, a national coalition of fifty exhibitions across the country that lead up to the presidential elections. That same year Hazelwood worked with Anne Brodzky and DeWitt Cheng to curate the Art of Democracy: War and Empire.
In 2017, Hazelwood was the recipient of the “Artwork as Revolution Award” from the Coalition on Homelessness and his work is represented in the collections of the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens; the Lillie M. Kleven Print Collection at the Bemidji State University, Minnesota; the Eskenazi Museum of Art, University of Indiana, Bloomington; the Fresno Museum of Art, California; the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, California; the Ball State University Art Museum, Muncie, Indiana; the Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut; the New York Public Library and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Stanford Library Special Collections, Stanford University, California; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
