WASHINGTON, DC, Wednesday, March 20, 2024 – Steve Brodner has been named the winner of the 2024 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Steve Brodner has been a leading satiric artist for the last 40 years. His goal during this time was to find an outlet for various forms of political and social commentary in the world of independent, freelance art.
His work has appeared in most major publications in the US. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, GQ, etc. His work currently appears regularly in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Nation. It also appears daily at stevebrodner.substack.com and weekly in thenation.com.
Brodner has covered over 50 stories as a journalist, including 16 national political conventions, the US farm crisis, a profile of life along the Mexican border, guns in Philadelphia, and climbing Mt. Fuji. The Naked Campaign, his 32 short films for NewYorker.com, documented the 2008 presidential year. In 2008 he was the subject of a major career retrospective, Raw Nerve, the first for a living artist, at the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Over 30 years he has won numerous awards from the Society of Illustrators, Art Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers, the Society of Newspaper Designers, American Illustration, and Communication Arts. In 2000 he won the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and has been the recipient of two Reuben Awards from The National Cartoonists Society. He received a Gold medal for Editorial work by the Society of Illustrators and was the finalist of the 2018 Herblock Prize.
His career retrospective: Freedom Fries (2004) and the story of the Covid years in the US: Living and Dying in America (2022) were both published by Fantagraphics Books. Brodner has kept a regular schedule of lecturing and is currently an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York
The Herblock Prize is awarded annually by The Herb Block Foundation for "distinguished examples of editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous independent standard set by Herblock." The winner receives a $20,000 net cash prize and a sterling silver Tiffany trophy. Steve Brodner will receive the Prize on June 4th in a ceremony held at the Library of Congress. The Honorable Stephen Breyer, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S, will deliver the annual Herblock Lecture at the awards ceremony.
Judges for this year's contest included Ann Telnaes, winner of the 2023 Herblock Prize and Jen Sorensen, winner of the Herblock Prize 2014. They stated "Brodner's work is unflinching, driven by a strong moral compass and imbued with a powerful sense of compassion. As the quote from Herblock engraved on the trophy reads, "Political cartoons, unlike sundials, do not show the brightest hours. They often show the darkest ones, in the hope of helping us move on to brighter times." Steve Brodner embodies this ideal: a singular, courageous voice who through the use of his artistic and writing abilities, spotlights inequities and injustices in the world. His portfolio offers a mixture between traditional print media and the new opportunities that social media provides cartoonists. In a time of rising autocratic voices and governments, Steve's work reminds us of the important role editorial cartooning has in a free press and democracies."
The Herblock finalist for 2024 is Pedro Molina. He will receive a $7,500 net cash prize. The judges said "Threatened by the regime in his native Nicaragua, Pedro Molina has proven himself a master cartoonist in the United States, where he chose to exile himself. Bringing an immigrant's point of view, he depicts anti-immigrant rhetoric as toxic to the United States." Molina says he wants to "alert US citizens of authoritarian behaviors that I have already seen and experienced as a citizen in Latin America for them to not fall into those same traps, such as the manipulation of religion, the control of the Judicial System by a single person, the violence, the populism and the search for common "enemies" from outside our borders."
The Herb Block Foundation seeks to further the recognition and support of editorial cartooning: www.HerbblockFoundation.org.
Sarah Alex
Co-President
The Herb Block Foundation
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