Art Hazelwood artist, impresario and instigator lives in San Francisco. He tries to integrate being an artist with curating and political activism. He was born in 1961 in Concord, Massachusetts and studied art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduating in 1983 he spent ten years traveling and living in several places. He first lived in Seattle where he worked as a leaf raker, and carpenter’s assistant before traveling for a year in Asia. Returning to the US he traveled around the country, living in New York and working as a janitor for a time before ending up in Santa Fe. In 1989 he left again and moved to Tokyo where he taught English. After more travels in Asia he ended up in Vienna until 1993 when he moved to San Francisco.
In San Francisco Hazelwood worked with several arts organizations including the California Society of Printmakers. He became assistant to the artist William Wolff, organizing and promoting Wolff’s artwork. Hazelwood also assisted several other artists and artists’ estates, by organizing retrospectives, cataloging the artist’s body of work and aiding in the sale and promotion of the artwork. Artists include, Richard Correll, Frank Rowe, Daniel Robeski, Patricia C. Brandes, Casper Banjo, and Roy Ragle. He has organized more than 20 group exhibitions and curated shows for individual artists including retrospectives of several artists.
In 2008, together with Stephen Fredericks of the New York Society of Etchers, he organized the Art of Democracy a national coalition, producing more than one hundred political posters and bringing together more than fifty political art shows taking place all over the country leading up to the presidential elections. In 2009 he curated three major exhibitions. The first, a three year traveling exhibition which examines artists’ responses to homelessness from the New Deal to the present, opened at the California Historical Society in San Francisco. He also curated a history of the relief print in Northern California; nearly one hundred woodcuts, linocuts and wood engravings over a one hundred year span, at the Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. And he curated a retrospective of slain artist Casper Banjo at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. Since 1993 he has worked with several homeless rights organizations creating artwork for street newspapers, creating posters and helping to organize fundraising events.
Art has created three public art projects to date, the first in 1999, a mural at the Vallejo Arts Foundation. He completed two ceramic tile murals in 2009, one, a memorial to Arnett Watson, a homeless rights activist, the other in a program to aid children of incarcerated parents at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco. His show of prints, Hubris Corpulentus, about the current US wars, traveled to several venues around the country from 2003 to 2006. Between 2001 and 2008 he created three large scale book projects with print publisher Eastside Editions in San Francisco. Each of these book projects took two years to complete. His prints are in several public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, RSDI Museum, Stanford Special Collections Library, Yale Special Collections Library, Achenbach Collection.
