In a world where everyone with a smartphone can be a photographer and anyone with Photoshop can twist images to suit their agenda, we’re becoming numb to the power of a photograph. Molly Crabapple believes that the power of art is to soap-box images that jaded eyes might overlook.

Crabapple’s art style couples a dark playfulness with spidery sketchy lines and a saucy confrontational quality that’s present whether she’s rendering the curve of a burlesque dancer’s ass or highlighting the censorship around Guantanamo Bay with startling blank spaces in lieu of the faces she was not officially permitted to draw. Her work is outward-facing, staring down the world, an almost masculine sensibility more in common with the radical politics of someone like Rivera rather than the reflective qualities of something more Kahlo-esque.

The daughter of an artist and a Marxist, Crabapple spent her teens and early twenties hustling in the modern bohemian demimonde as both artist and ‘professional naked girl’: then Occupy Wall Street happened. In the wake of the economic downturn, she found her niche among the protests and calls for a more equal society, combining her art and her socialist ideals, drawing the revolution. Her ‘General Strike’ poster from Occupy made the transition from street art to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art — something she regards with wry amusement — and she now travels the world writing and drawing in places that cameras might not always be permitted, including Syria, Athens, Gitmo and Gaza.