Artist and musician to showcase paintings, drawings, New Yorker cartoons, editorial caricatures, and songs spanning 17-year career
Andy Friedman is an artist, writer, musician, illustrator and cartoonist whose work has been featured in some of America’s most prestigious publications. From 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, June 10, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park (3883 Stone Quarry Road) will host an opening reception for “The Loneliness of the Common Player,” an exhibition of original paintings, drawings, cartoons and illustrations spanning Friedman’s nearly 20-year long career.
Friedman’s first professional illustration, a portrait of the country-singer Hank Williams III, was published by The New Yorker in 1999, while the artist was working as a staff assistant and messenger in the editorial department of the magazine. In 2000, Friedman became the assistant to the cartoon editor, where he began slipping his own humorous drawings into the weekly batch of submissions under the pseudonym Larry Hat. His first captioned gag cartoon was published a year later. In 2012, Friedman began to sign his cartoons under his own name, becoming the first cartoonist to publish work under two different names in the magazine’s rich history.
Friedman left his post in the cartoon department of The New Yorker in 2002 to support the publication of his first book of art and poetry, “Drawings & Other Failures,” with a “Slideshow Poetry” performance. He traveled the nation for three-years alone with a slide-projector, a portable screen and a microphone to accompany projections of the drawings and Polaroid photographs from his book with spoken word on stage.
In 2005, Friedman released his debut album of original songs, “Taken Man,” which he recorded less than a year after learning his first chords on the guitar. The artist had never sung a serious note in his life until he entered the recording studio. Friedman’s reputation germinated with the release of 2009’s “Weary Things,” which garnered him a growing national underground following, a performance on NPR’s Mountain Stage and a feature interview on XM’s The Bob Edwards Show.
In 2012, Friedman removed himself from the road to work on his first book of essays and drawings.
He will return to the stage with Crump and “Goody” in tow at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, June 10, and at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, with a pair of concerts at The Nelson Odeon (4035 Nelson Road) as part of the venue’s Fourth Annual Skunk Funk Music Festival. Other performers on the bill include Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault and Dusty Pas’cal.
