Published on November 02, 2021

Elise Engler

Diary of a Radio Junkie, 1888 Days of Waking Up to the News, mixed media collage on paper, 270 drawings, various dimensions, 2016-2021.

“For the Diary I had planned to depict one headline each day for all of 2016. I was not expecting to chronicle a prolonged drama. When Donald Trump ran for office and won and I quickly realized this was not the time to stop my drawing. His would be a presidency like no other, and I wanted to continue to document it, day by day. So over the course of five years, I carried on rising at the crack of dawn to catch the morning’s radio news.

By the end of 2019, my work formed a record of one of the most turbulent periods in our history. I had no idea that the coming year would top it. When the Covd-19 pandemic began and George Floyd was murdered, an already frenetic time drastically ratcheted up.

My art has alternated from the personal; drawing everything I own, chronicling travels, or depicting block-by- block the entire length of Broadway in Manhattan (A Year on Broadway), to the political as with Tax-Onomies and this Diary project. I never quite know where the work will land until I start and see where and how it all goes.” Elise Engler, 2021.

A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 by Elise Engler, 288 pages, has been published by Metropolitan Books this year and is on sale in the major book stores.

https://eliseengler.com/