Edward Monovich Ampoohtee 2003 mixed media on paper 22" x 20.5" [installation view]

Edward Monovich Satellite Fist 2006 mixed media on paper 17" x 22" [installation view]

That other increasingly-legendary New York homeless institution, Eyewash, displayed about a half dozen examples of Edward Monovich's beautiful mixed media drawings on graph paper at the Red Dot fair this past week.

Monovich's work turns the hoary tradition of great battle art on its head: Here no prince has commissioned the work, and these compact paper murals depict not the glory and the spoils but the shame and the costs of war, specifically our very latest one.

Maybe it's just my perversity, but I had initially been so attracted to the delicate beauty and imagination of the drawing that it hadn't even occurred to me that they were "political". They were clearly art, and if there are narratives here, the narratives are clearly not false. Can they still be stamped as political, and to that extent simply unmarketable?

[as I was searching Google just looking for links, I was surprised to be reminded of this from almost three years ago]