Art Hazelwood calls himself an artist, impresario and instigator. As impresario he has worked to protect and promote the artwork of many artists in their final years, including organizing several retrospective exhibitions. He has also curated several museum exhibitions including the traveling exhibition Hobos to Street People: Artists' Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present, and California in Relief, a history of the relief print in Northern California at the Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary's College in Moraga, California in 2009, and a show on the political art of the 1930s at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, CA.

 

As instigator, Hazelwood has organized political exhibitions, most ambitiously in 2008 he organized with Stephen Fredericks a nationwide political art coalition of over fifty shows called Art of Democracy. And in 2011, with Francisco Dominguez and Doug Minkler, he organized a national touring show called New World Border: Responses to the US Mexico Border Wall. The role of instigator also encompasses his ongoing work on issues of poverty and economic justice with several activist West Coast homeless rights groups.

 

As an artist, Hazelwood is a printmaker as well as a creator of public art and has made work that is political, satirical and sometimes literary in a range of forms from posters to fine press artist books. He created two large scale ceramic tile murals in San Francisco. One, dedicated to the memory of Arnett Watson, homeless rights activist, was created with Jos Sances. In 2000 he was invited to create prints at Eastside Editions which led to a six year long collaboration with the press on three large scale book projects. More recently, he created a large scale linocut print for Philagrafika in Philadelphia. He has collaborated with several artists on projects including the Great Tortilla Conspiracy (an edible art performance group); a portable mural on the Afghan war with Juan Fuentes; some guerilla posters with artists that can't be publicly named; and an involved pop up opera on the Afghanistan war called Tora Bora, with book binder Klaus Rotzscher. Hazelwood's prints are in several major collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress and regularly appear in several West Coast street newspapers.