Marc Shanker

Marc Shanker (1946) trained as an Orientation and Mobility Instructor for the Blind but spent the greater part of his working life in administrative positions in the labour movement.

After college, Marc began to make art.  He rejected a formal art education preferring instead to struggle alone toward a realization of his own creative vision. 

Working "high and low", Marc uses humor, irony and paradox to reference existential questions, and issues regarding art, language and contemporary social problems. 

His subjects range from the Ladino proverbs of the Sephardic Jews to the complexities and absurdities of modern life. Marc works in a number of mediums, often in combination: paint, wax crayons, collage, pen & ink, intaglio and dry point.

In 2008 Marc founded Gravity Free Press to show, publish and distribute his artwork, books, broadsides, and to serve as a platform for collaborative projects with other artists, especially writers and poets.

My introduction to Marc‘s work is his beautiful book Tracesof Sepharad (Huellas de Sefarad), Etchings of Judeo-Spanish Proverbs, the proverbs of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, in Ladino.