2024 Prize Winner

Steve Brodner

2024 Brodner picture
caricature artist, political cartoonist, educator, and author

Steve Brodner has been a leading satiric artist for the last 40 years.

His goal during this time was to find a home 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 NY 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.

He 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, 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. He has won many major awards in the graphic arts, including medals at the Society of Illustrators, Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, SPD, the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College and the St. Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union and the Masters Series Award from the School of Visual Arts.

His work currently appears daily at stevebrodner.substack.com and weekly in thenation.com . 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.

He is an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

The Herblock Prize judges said "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."

https://www.stevebrodner.com

Winner's Works (Images)
Winner's speech