Front Pages

The artist uses rubber stamps and pastels to alter and enhance the front page of the New York Times for each day of 1996

Every day for an entire year, artist Nancy Chunn transformed page one of the New York Times into a canvas and created a painting in response to its contents. She altered photographs, painted all kinds of images and symbols, and supplied alternative headlines, offering witty, ironic, compassionate, and caustic visual and verbal commentary on all the news the New York Times saw fit to print on their illustrious front page. The headline "A Surge in Jobs Shows Strength in the Economy" inspired Don't Tell Wall Street, followed by a big black "down" arrow. Flotillas of coffins shadow articles about massacres; a field of blue crosses and the phrase "Greed Is Good" hover beneath the headline "A Move to Hospitals-for-Profit Gaining Support in New York." As readers track "happy" faces, footprints, rolling heads, pulled plugs, and targets across columns of type, they will either be riled by Chunn's doodlings or will feel that she has given a year's worth of head shakings and mutterings lasting form and meaning. Donna Seaman