The Radical Politics of Pleasure: Molly Crabapple & Camille Sojit Pejcha in Conversation

Molly Crabapple has traveled the world, from active war zones to underground subcultures and the front lines of political protest, to draw moments of rebellion. During her stint as resident artist at The Box in New York City, she documented the culture of hedonism that predated the financial crash, both satirizing the one percent and capturing the humanity of the dancers and workers who served them. This “artistic coming-of-age” led her to play a formative role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, where she served as both artist and organizer; to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where she sketched military commission hearings; to protests in Puerto Rico; autonomous zones in Greece; and the Ukraine under Russian bombs.

As she bridges the gap between art and politics, Crabapple has been likened to an artistic version of the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—going from model and muse to “the millennial generation’s first great radical artist.” But even as she documents the human face of social change, Crabapple never loses track of the essential desires that drive it, seeking out spaces that merge radical politics with the pursuit of pleasure, community care, and free expression. From the anarchist bikers providing hurricane relief to the queer nightlife communities keeping the spirit of New York alive at the Chelsea Hotel, she captures the people carrying this spirit forward amidst global turmoil.

Tonight, she joins sex and nightlife reporter Camille Sojit Pejcha to discuss the revolutionary potential of partying—and how political rebellion, sexuality, and freedom of expression have always been intertwined. Together, they turn their attention toward the importance of spaces that exist outside of what artist and author Sophia Giovannitti terms “Empire Time”: carving out pockets of freedom within a capitalist system, and with them, creating the possibility of alternative futures.

Ticket price includes one complimentary beverage in our Café.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2018. Her reportage is the 2022 winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Crabapple’s animations have been nominated for an Emmy five times and also won an Edward R. Murrow Award. She was a 2024 fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library while researching her upcoming book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund.

Camille Sojit Pejcha is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor covering sex, culture, art, and nightlife. Formerly the Features Director at Document Journal, Pejcha has contributed to the New York Times, W, Slate, and other leading publications. She is the creator of Pleasure-Seeking, a bestselling Substack newsletter and podcast read across hundreds of countries and referenced in the New York Times for its insights on sex, desire, and modern culture. She’s a columnist at Elephant Magazine, and her work has been written about in such publications as Byline, Dazed, PAPER, and Office Magazine.

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