ERIC DROOKER
curriculae vitae
Born in 1958 in New York City, and raised on the Lower East Side.
Graduate of Brooklyn Friends High School.
BFA, Cooper Union, 1983.

Eric Drooker supports himself as a freelance artist and illustrator. His work often appears in national newspapers and magazines, including the op-ed page of The New York Times, and The Village Voice.  He has furnished seven covers for The New Yorker since 1995, as well as numerous covers for The Nation and The Progressive. He presently lives in Berkeley, California, where he moved in 1998. 

Publications:
World War III Anthology, co-edited by Eric Drooker with Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, 1984-1989.  Founded in 1980, WWIII continues publishing their comix-narrative digest, with issue #29 now available.  Work by Eric Drooker is available in two anthologies: WWIII Anthology: 1980-1989, Fantagraphics, 1990, Seattle; and WWIII: Confrontational Comix, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995, New York.

Flood! A Novel in Pictures, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992, New York.  Winner of the 1992 American Book Award; a winner of New York Times Editor’s Choice/Notable Book of 1992; L.A. Times Finalist, Best Books of 1992. 

Illuminated Poems, texts by Allen Ginsberg, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996, New York.
 
Street Posters and Ballads, Seven Stories Press, 1998, New York.  Winner of the 1999 Firecracker Alternative Book Award.  This volume collects dozens of the author’s political street posters from the final decade of the 20th century, addressing political and community issues of the Lower East Side ranging from police brutality, and homelessness to squatting and real estate speculation.

Blood: A Novel without Words, Harcourt, 2002 (issued simultaneously with the 2nd edition of Flood!).
 
Exhibitions:
Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, Summer 1996: solo retrospective of paintings and drawings. 
Exit Art, New York, 1997, “Art and Activist Posters, 1951-1997.”  Traveling exhibit. 
Exhibition of original cover art for The New Yorker :
     Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, 1999.
     Wilhelm Bush Museum, Hanover, Germany, 2000.
     Alex Meyerovich Gallery, San Francisco, 2001.

L’Association, Paris, Comix 2000, publishers of an international anthology of wordless narratives, with traveling exhibit, “Comix 2000 Tour.”  Appearing in Paris, Koln, Milano, and elsewhere.
Drooker’s Musical Slide Lecture, New York (Poetry Project/St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery), San Francisco, Amsterdam and various locations, 1996-2001.

Works Collected:
Paintings in the private collections of Tina Brown, Clare Cooke, Gene Avel, Karl Kierstead. 

OFFERING, March 2004, from BOOKLYN
An Archive of the Original Artwork from:
FLOOD! A Novel in Pictures     
an American Book Award Winner by Eric Drooker
New York Times Editor’s Choice 1992
Archived original artwork, comprising the complete body of FLOOD!, 137 scratchboard illustrations:
§  44 pcs joined in 22 spreads measuring 9” x 12”
§  34 pcs measuring 5” x 7”
§  31 pcs measuring 8 ” x 11”
§  19 pcs measuring 9 ” x 6”
§  4 pcs measuring 7 ” x 10”
§  3 pcs misc. sizes.

Publication history:
Four Walls Eight Windows first edition, 1992,
First printing: 2,000.
Second printing: 3,000.
Third printing: 2,000.
Quality Paperback Books fourth printing: 8,000. 
Second edition (2002 from Dark Horse Books): 5,000.  
§  Includes new wrap-around cover painting, and a new preface by urban and social historian Luc Sante.

Selected Quotes from Reviews of FLOOD!

“A picture of a soulless civilization headed toward the apocalypse. . . .  A poetic and lyrical novel . . . . The artist gains authority as he explores the form. . . .  Drooker has discovered the magic of pulling light and life out of an inky sea of darkness.”
                        — Art Spiegelman, New York Times.

“Drooker’s old Poe visions of beauteous deathly reality transcend political hang up and fix our present American dreams.”
              — Allen Ginsberg, from the preface to the 1st ed.

“When the rush of war parades is over, a simple and elegant remainder of humanity remains—in the work of Eric Drooker.”
                        — Sue Coe.

“Drooker’s brilliant evocations of the menacing metropolis are wordless apocalypses.”
                        — Lucy Lippard,  New York Up Front.

“Drooker documents contemporary events, but renders them as part of the tragic continuum of human history.  This mythic quality helps explain [his] widespread appeal.  Drooker’s iconic images have a way of lingering.  I recently spied one of his stark cityscapes tattooed on the calf of a young traveler.”
                        — Sarah Ferguson, The Village Voice.

“A brilliantly colorful, almost Blakean lyricism suffuses Drooker’s . . . post-apocalyptic visions of urban bleakness.”
                        — [Staff review], The New Yorker.

Introduction to the Second Edition of FLOOD!
by Luc Sante

Eric Drooker’s FLOOD! is the last surviving document of a city that now lies as distant and irretrievable as Gondwanaland.  Accrued time, money under the bridge, the fluctuations of memory separate us from that city as surely as the entire depth of the ocean.  On the other hand, that city has merely changed masks.  It remains as labyrinthine, as changeable, as deadly, but it has gotten itself a new face from a crooked sawbone and is attempting to pass itself off as some other critter.  The city, as Drooker knows, is something ancient, maybe pre-human.  I had a dream once in which somebody told me, “I saw the city before it had any people in it, when the buildings had been built but were not yet inhabited.”  On the other hand, all those decisions of life and death are made by humans.  The city is merely their accomplice, their tool, if not their alibi.  The city embodies something feral in the hearts of all those who live there.  The city is a mirror of its inhabitants, and not necessarily a distorting mirror.

FLOOD! is a prophetic book, not in the sense of Edgar Cayce but in that of the Book of Amos.  Maybe the events it depicts have already come to pass, maybe many times over, or maybe they never will, but either way the warning stands—and the promise, too, destruction and renewal being inseparably tied together.  Drooker’s mastery of the pure stark elemental expressionist line not only suggests volumes in every stroke, but also places the images it depicts in an eternal, un-nameable tense that is not quite the present but remains poised somewhere between past and future.  The book comes directly out of a historical moment—the upheavals of the city of New York in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s—that marked him, and me, and a few million others forever, but FLOOD! has wings that send it soaring above and beyond that moment and into the mystery.