Front pages

the long version

Front Pages is an illustrated novel of the real world created by the painter Nancy Chunn. Every day of 1996 Chunn claimed as an artistic canvas the front page of the New York Times. Using specialized rubber stamps and bold pastels to enhance, eradicate, and alter images and text, she created a commentary - colorful, intense, smart, compassionate, visually explosive - on the year's events and the power of the press. When these artworks were shown at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, they created a sensation. Chunn's treatment of the events we all lived through - the Presidential campaign, the crash of TWA flight 800, the wars in Chechnya and Rwanda - will strike an immediate chord in readers tuned in to the complex frequencies of a political world awash in images and news. Gary Indiana's interview with the artist provides lively and intimate insights into the artistic process as means of talking back to power and engaging with the world. Front Pages is being published to coincide with an exhibition of these works at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, January 10-March 2, 1998.