Al Mutanabbi Street, March 5, 2007 2011
Art Hazelwood, USA

This book starts with an imagined scene of the booksellers street. The next page begins a long foldout with the car bomb explosion represented in a death head cloud. Books flying about are labeled with different bookseller areas of the world, a symbol of the attack on the culture of the book - Istanbul, Paris, London, and Tokyo. As the books fly away people fly with them but they are reaching for books, and their flight becomes a movement across space to become like satellites circling the earth looking down at the planet over the Middle East. Art Hazelwood is a printmaker and curator. He has organised political art shows including national exhibitions - Art of Democracy in 2008, and New World Border in 2011. He has curated several museum shows including the traveling exhibition Hobos to Street People: Artists' Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present. He is also the author of a book based on the show. Hazelwood's prints and books are in several collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. His political prints regularly appear in several west coast homeless newspapers.

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