Art Hazelwood - prints and biography
Political and Social Commentary in Contemporary Printmaking
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Woodcut
Year: 2025
Edition of 11
ImageSize: 15 × 21 inches
Rendered in Hazelwood's distinctive black-and-white linocut style, the print combines expressive carving with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. The busy scene rewards close inspection, revealing multiple interactions and artworks within artworks. Rather than focusing on a single subject, Hazelwood presents the art world as a shared endeavor, emphasizing the labor, relationships, and community that support artistic culture.
Rooted in the social-realist traditions of American and Mexican printmaking, Art Auction transforms an ordinary working moment into a compelling study of creativity, cooperation, and cultural engagement.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Linocut
Year: 2025
Edition of 11
Image Size: 12 × 12.75 inches
Hazelwood's bold relief carving creates dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, while energetic lines and sculptural forms convey movement and intensity. The compressed composition places the viewer directly within the action, emphasizing the concentration of the young athletes and the guiding presence of their coach. Rooted in the traditions of social-realist printmaking, the work celebrates neighborhood life and the role of organized sports in fostering discipline, confidence, and community.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color linocut
Year: 2008
Edition: 15
ImageSize: 17 3/8 x 24 1/4"
Signed by the artist, from the numbered edition of 15 prints.
Designed for the homeless advocacy organization WRAP: Western Regional Advocacy Project, this image was executed as both a fine art print and a poster.
A creature, part human, part animal, its body composed of institutional buildings, newspapers, bankers, stock brokers, politicians and the like, spouts words of fear and hate over a demolished cityscape.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: monoprint, linocut and rubber stamps
Year: 2004
Edition of 1
ImageSize: 34 x 23.5 inches
Signed by the artist
Art Hazelwood's monoprint "Oil War Memorial" was a protest against the Iraq War, with its ties to oil interests. Two silhouetted soldiers in helmets stand as somber sentinels, their rifles reversed in a gesture of mourning, while a border of small crosses and rifles reinforces the theme of loss. The reddish-brown hues evoke blood and desolation, aligning with the "No Blood for Oil" rallying cry that echoed during the massive global protests against the war. This piece mourns the war’s staggering toll—over half a million Iraqi deaths and a $2 trillion U.S. cost—challenging the narrative of liberation with a raw depiction of sacrifice for resource exploitation.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color woodcut
Year: 2022
Edition of 8
Image Size: 24 x 11 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: linocut
Year: 2022
Edition of 15
Image Size: 19.74 x14 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: linocut
Year: 2021
Edition of 23
Image Size: 12 x 14 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: etching & engraving
Year: 2006
Image Size: 24 x 14 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color reduction woodcut
Year: 2017
Edition of 15
Image Size: 14 x 9 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: linocut
Year: 2006
Edition of 20
Image Size: 18 x 18 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: 14 screenprints in portfolio cover
Year: 2014-2024
Edition: 15
ImageSize: 17 3/8 x 24 1/4"
Fourteen posters in portfolio with screenprint cover and colophon, five sets available, 20" x 13" x 1/4"
Over the last ten years, 2014-2024, San Francisco Poster Syndicate has been printing screenprint posters for political actions in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’ve printed, often on site, for strikes, city budget fights, grassroots demos, and mass actions. Over this period I’ve created over one hundred and seventy poster designs. Of these most end up in the hands of activists, surviving on office walls and home windows, or tread under foot by protestors. Occasionally there are extras. I cobbled together five sets of fourteen posters - no two sets alike - and put them in a portfolio. The portfolio cover was designed as the foldout poster for a Poster Syndicate zine. The Calaveras character in that cover is based on a Posada dingbat we use in homage in our logo. Together these posters tell an incomplete but representative story of the political struggles of these times.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: etching with aquatint
Year: 2000
Edition of 15
Image Size: 12 x 9 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: woodcut
Year: 1992
Edition of 50
Image Size: 8 x 12 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color Woodcut
Year: 2017
Edition: 12
Image Size: 12 x 11.25 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: screenprint
Year: 2013
Edition of 16
Image Size: 10 x 11.75 inches
Art Hazelwood
Biography
Art Hazelwood describes himself as an artist, instigator, and impresario, three roles that intertwine throughout his prolific career and reflect his belief that art can and should engage directly with the social and political realities of its time. Read our entire article here: Art Hazelwood - artist, impresario, instigator
Known primarily as a printmaker, Hazelwood has used the medium with remarkable versatility, ranging from politically charged posters pasted on city walls to meticulously crafted fine press artist books. His work embraces the full spectrum of printmaking’s possibilities, uniting the urgency of political commentary with the enduring traditions of craftsmanship.
Hazelwood’s prints frequently deploy political allegory and satire, drawing on centuries-old traditions of social critique in art while speaking directly to contemporary issues. His imagery often harnesses the power of exaggeration, caricature, and metaphor to challenge systems of inequality and expose injustices.
For more than twenty years, Hazelwood has worked closely with homeless rights organizations, producing street posters, broadsides, and fine press publications that amplify the experiences of unhoused individuals. He has authored one book and contributed to another on the subject of art and homelessness, bringing sustained attention to a crisis often ignored in public discourse. His prints are also a regular presence in several West Coast street newspapers, reaching audiences outside of conventional gallery contexts.
View Art Hazelwood's Biography
Art Hazelwood’s work aligns with a broader tradition of socially engaged and protest-based printmaking, including:
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color woodcut
Year: 2023
Edition of 20
Image Size: 22.5 x 11 inches
Young woman poised on a bicycle against the urban backdrop of Kanagawa, Japan.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: color woodcut
Year: 2014
Edition of 22
Image Size: 36 x 11 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: woodcut
Year: 2009
Edition of 20
Image Size: 26.5 x 6 inches
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Color woodcut
Year: 2012
Edition of 16
Image Size: 25 x 8.75 inches
Artist Books and Portfolios
By: Art Hazelwood
Book Size: 12 x 9" x 1-3/8" ;
Image Sizes: twenty nine screenprint images of varying size on forty four pages
Year: 2020
View a Vimeo presentation of Tipping Point
A linen-bound art book with original color screenprints conceived of and printed by Art Hazelwood. The book binder and three-dimensional conceptual artist is Asa Nakata, who in addition to the binding has designed the interactive pull-tab art piece for the final page of the book, involving magnets and string to emulate the motion of a guillotine.
The colophon reads: "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. Its [sic] a power that can chalLenge the fascists if only the sleeping giant can arise to otherthrow these forces and create a world that embraces all life.
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Hand-printed artist book,
Year: Created from 2022-2024 and bound by the artist in 2025.
Edition Size: 25
Size: 9 × 10.75 x .75 inches
$800
(1) Screenprint book with fifteen pages
(2) six pages of Fascist Mix 'n Match split images;
(3) a board game called It's No Game; and
(4) a Jigsaw puzzle, showing the interlocking pattern of international fascists and their corporate oligarch buddies.
“While I had hoped it would be irrelevant, by the time this project was printed in 2024 and complete in March of 2025 it had already become clear that the US is on a fascist track, an ally of dictatorships and a nation in love with hate. Included in the book is a mix of mockery and seriousness. Quotes from Congressional testimony of the January 6 coup attempt, political cartoon like imagery created from chalkboard drawings, six pages of Fascist Mix 'n Match split images, a board game called It's No Game and a Jigsaw puzzle, showing the interlocking pattern international fascists and their corporate oligarch buddies.” - Art Hazelwood
Sample pages are shown here
By: Art Hazelwood
Book Size: 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 1 ;
Twenty-eight screenprinted pages, plus cover printed front and back
Conceived, drawn, & screenprinted by Art Hazelwood
Book binding & design by Asa Nakata
Year: 2022
The multiple disasters of 2020 and the resulting rise of mutual aid groups during Covid-19 lockdown led Hazelwood to the writings of William Morris. In his lecture The Origins of Ornamental Art, 1872 he presents six conditions to create a livable world based on his belief in the twin values of art and socialism. To paraphrase Morris - without art, work is alienation and without work, art is elitism.
Morris describes the six conditions, briefly summarized here: first, extinction of poverty; second, leisure; third, avoidance of wasteful work; fourth, care of the beauty of the earth; fifth, education according to capacity, and sixth, abolition of class distinctions-real, mind you, not formal.
With limited access to an art studio Hazelwood resorted to paper cut as a simple straight forward means to create imagery. The book includes quotes from Pieter Kropotkin and David Graeber and images for each of the six categories with the text by Morris. The paper cut images were used as the basis for the screenprints making up this book.
By: Art Hazelwood
Francois Rabelais (circa 1490 - 1553) and his satirical writings on the illustrious giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, were the inspiration for this book of prints by Art Hazelwood. Rabelais was a scholar of erudition, a mocker of manners, a defender of appetites, an adherent of wine, and a champion of laughter.
This visual interpretation was inspired by an episode where Friar John, a monk of considerable thirst, is outraged by the invading army's destruction of the grape harvest.
This continuous image book is made up of 10 separate prints joined together into one, as well as a cover image, title page and colophon. The entire book when spread out measures 18" x 288" (inches). When closed the book measures 18" x 18" (inches).
Gargantua in the Vineyard Cover
Most Noble Boozers
For All Your Ills
The Dregs
They Attack
Panurge and Gargantua
Fetid Wind
Blown Away
Gargantua Gets The Grapes
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: Boxed Portfolio
Year: 2004
Technique: 12 color etchings with a linocut border.
Image Size: 16 3/4 x 12 3/4" platemarks
Signature: pencil, on colophon
Edition Size: 20
Cyrano was the true life inspiration for the romantic figure of Edmond de Rostand's nineteenth-century play. He was a satirist, swordsmen, poet, and philosopher who indeed had a prodigious appendage.This translation from the original French, based on the 1662 edition, was made by Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
The prints are color etchings with a linocut border. The text was printed letterpress within a linocut border. All the prints are on handmade paper made at Eastside Editions. The prints for this series were printed in an edition of twenty. Ten sets were bound as books, and ten were left loose in portfolio boxes.
The price for the book or the portfolio box is $5,500. The following individual prints are available separately for the price of $550- Dew Flight, In Canada, Fireworks, In Prison, The Measure of Man
By: Art Hazelwood
Created for the exhibition 'Banned and Recovered' at the San Francisco Center for the Book in 2008.
The book opens to reveal Candide and Cunegonde kissing behind a screen of roses in the castle where they both grew up – “The Best of All Possible Worlds.” Thus begins the story of all the tragedies of their lives. Along the bottom of the imagery is text from the book with the final bit of wisdom discovered after all the disasters, “We must cultivate our own gardens.”
Candide or Optimism, 2008, edition of 15, screenprint, closed size: 7 3/8” x 12 1/2” x 1/2”, open size 7 1/4” x 72”, binding: gate fold hardcover, cover paper: various, marbled endpapers, thirteen pages, book body paper: Lana Cover White.
By: Art Hazelwood
Pulcinella in Hades is a new limited edition book created at Eastside Editions by Art Hazelwood. It is an accordion fold book… eight feet of continuous four plate color etchings, vertically descending into Hades. It’s a comedy. The protagonist, who appears in every image, is Pulcinella of the commedia dell’arte.
By: Art Hazelwood
Hubris Corpulentus is a state of obscene, overweening pride that produces monstrous realities out of the stupor of irrationality. This portfolio was created in response to the US invasion of Iraq.
Medium: portfolio of 10 engravings in a brown paper portfolio.
Portfolio Size: 9.5 x 13 inches
Year: 2003
Edition: 25
Images:
Title Page, 3.5 x 7.5 in.
Girding For War, 6 x 9 in.
Four Horsemen, 5.75 x 7.75 in.
Romance of War, 6 x 9 in.
Victory Parade 7.75 x 11.5 in.
Returning Heroes, (They Mourn), 7.25 x 10 in.
Liberty Brought To Baghdad, 6.75 x 8.75 in.
Summer Sport, 5.75 x 8.75 in.
Sycophants,engraving, 6 x 9 in.
Study For A War Monument, 7.5 x 9.75 in.
Hubris Corpulentus has been acquired by the following collections:
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York Public Library, St. Mary's College of California Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Institute Museum, Stanford Library Special Collections
By: Art Hazelwood
Medium: color woodcut
Year: 2007
Edition of 15
Image Size: 47 x 10 inches