Selected Works from 1990's

Selected Works from 1990's puts a slice of the William Crawford archive into circulation as a zine, which is close to the form the drawings originally took.

Thirty-two pages of black-and-white offset reproductions, staple-bound at 19 by 13 cm and published by Innen in Switzerland in 2016 in an edition of 500. The drawings are graphite on paper: interiors, couples and groups, women in heels and hats, a recurring man with a short afro and a moustache who is presumably the artist. Several sheets in the source archive carry captions or fragments of dialogue, the remains of sequences of thirty or more drawings that once read as stories.

Nothing is known of Crawford beyond the work. Roughly 950 drawings were found in an abandoned house in Oakland, California; some are on the backs of prison roster sheets dated 1997, cut down the middle so the institution cannot be identified, and San Francisco landmarks appear in the backgrounds. He signed a few sheets as Bill, William or WM Crawford. The archive was first shown in 2015 and has since been published by Innen and by Ampersand in Portland, and this zine is its most portable form.