Jerelle Kraus
Jerelle Kraus is the award-winning New York Times art director whose thirty-year tenure includes a record thirteen years at Op-Ed. She art directed Ramparts and City magazines and was an art director at Time. The New Yorker and New York Times magazines have published her writing. Educated at Swarthmore, Pomona, and l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she's received an MA and a Fulbright scholarship.
"Jerelle Kraus has been Op-Ed's brilliant art director far longer than anyone. All the Art illuminates her love affair with that remarkable space in the Times. Certain to become the illustrator's bible, its treasure-chest of ideas will be pillaged for many years to come." —Ronald Searle
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Books
All The Art That's Fit To Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page
In 1970, the New York Times launched Op-Ed, a groundbreaking phenomenon that transformed journalism. Not only did nonstaff bylines shatter tradition, but the pictures were revolutionary. Unlike anything ever seen in a newspaper, Op-Ed art became an internationally influential, fertile idiom that reached beyond narrative for metaphor and changed illustration's very purpose and potential. Conceived as a tool to add intellectual resonance and emotional impact to the prose, Op-Ed art accessed an eloquent underbelly where topical texts become springboards for illuminating our cosmic drama.
Written by thirty-year Times insider Jerelle Kraus, whose thirteen-year tenure on the volatile Op-Ed page far exceeds that of any art director or top editor, All the Art reveals Op-Ed's story from its conception to today while recounting the stormy confrontations of word and image, artist and editor.
Many illustrations killed by the Times for provocation, blasphemy, or political incorrectness are published here for the first time. Others appear in their original forms before Times editors stripped them of their wit.
Kraus's book reproduces more than 300 of Op-Ed's most striking images by 142 of the finest international graphic artists of our time. A treasury of illustration, this is also a stunning pictorial perspective on the events and personalities that shape our lives. Frank and sassy, Kraus's intimate tale takes the reader behind the scenes of the newspaper of record, where ego and ambition, stoicism and humor, can collide over a two-inch spot of art.
(Columbia University Press, November 2008)