A prominent satirical cartoonist, New York City-based Steve Brodner got his start in the illustrating business at a small New Jersey newspaper, the Hudson Dispatch. In 1977, the New York Times Book Review began commissioning Brodner for illustrations. In the following decades, Brodner’s work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Esquire, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and The Nation.
The New Yorker’s official political cartoonist for the 2008 presidential campaign, Brodner has also illustrated a handful of books, including Davy Crockett by Cass Howard Kunster, Sharing the Pie: A Citizen’s Guide to Wealth and Power in the United States by Steve Brouwer, and Fold ’N’ Tuck, an interactive pop-up-style book in which readers fold two celebrity faces together to create a third (e.g., Jerry Lewis plus Ronald Reagan equals George Bush).
This month a retrospective of 30-plus years of Brodner’s work, Raw Nerve: The Political Art of Steve Brodner, is showing at a venue dedicated to another of America’s great illustrators, the Norman Rockwell Museum. Raw Nerve features some of Brodner’s earliest pieces as well as some of his latest, including “Bombs and Rice” (pictured).
June 7-Oct. 26, reception: June 7, 6-8 p.m. Norman Rockwell Museum, 9 Glendale Rd., Route 183, Stockbridge, (413) 298-4100, www.nrm.org.
