For the fourth Esopus subscriber invitational, the New York–based artist asked readers to share their favorite things about the Big Apple. Polan received more than 100 submissions, and went on to draw each one from life.
RELATED EVENT: ”The Assembled Picture Library of New York” at Esopus Space
Jason Polan (1982–2020) was an American artist who lived and worked in New York City. His illustrations and projects appeared in Metropolis, The New Yorker, and ARTNews. His self-published artists’ books included Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art, a collection of line drawings of all the artwork that was visible to the public for two weeks in 2005. He exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe—including a show with Robin Cameron at Esopus Space in 2010—and his book Every Person in New York was published by Chronicle Books in 2015. Polan contributed the weekly column “Things I Saw” to The New York Times’s Opinionator blog from 2012 to 2013. Polan passed in 2020 from cancer at age 37.