Late 20th Century Sandy Huffaker, Oil Painting by Well Known Cartoonist and Illustrator Upper East Side, Manhattan, Framed

An Upper East Side of Manhattan New York city scene of bald guy reading newspaper on bench with East River and tugboat in background.
The 1970s were the “glory days,” Huffaker says, for himself and a stable of talented illustrators whose work routinely found itself on the covers of the nation’s premier newsmagazines and in the pages of The New York Times. For the better part of that decade, Huffaker was among an elite breed of commercial artists—his hero and fellow Southerner Jack Davis, the legendary Mad Magazine illustrator, among them—working during a remarkable period when art directors routinely turned to illustration to give comic relief to the country’s deeply serious and dark problems. From civil rights and the women’s movement to Vietnam and Watergate, the gas crisis and inflation to the rise of Jimmy Carter, Huffaker mined a deep well of material ripe for his brand of visual wit and caustic satire. He sent his portfolio to children’s book illustrator Maurice Sendak, the legendary “Where The Wild Things Are” illustrator to gauge his prospects, and when Sendak replied, “C’mon up, you’ll do all right,”

SELECT HONORS:
2 Page-One Awards (from the New York Newspaper Guild), for work in Fortune Magazine and Sports Illustrated.
Nominated 3 times for Cartoonist-of-the-Year by the National Cartoonists Society (illustration category).
Desi Award of Excellence (Graphic Design Magazine).
20 Award of Merit citations from the Society of Illustrators.
One-man show, Society of Illustrators.
Illustrators 22 – annual national exhibition for the Society of Illustrators.

SELECT MAGAZINE COVERS
Time Magazine (6),
Sports Illustrated (2),
Business Week (12),
Forbes,
Saturday Review,
New York Times Sunday Magazine,
The New Republic,
Family Weekly,
Madison Avenue,
New York Daily News Sunday Magazine (2),
Junior Scholastic,
ACLU,
The Nation , and more

EDUCATION BA, University of Alabama. Attended Pratt Graphic Center and The Art Students League, New York City.

BOOKS WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED The Dispensible Man (M. Evans and Co.) and The Bald Book (M. Evans and Co.) BOOKS ILLUSTRATED White Is (Grove Press), The Begatting of a President (Ballantine Books), The Biggest Sneeze (Harper-Collins), H. Phillip Birdsong’s ESP (Young Scott Books), Kids Letters to President Reagan (M. Evans), The Worlds Greatest Left-Handers (M. Evans), Does My Room Come Alive at Night (HarperCollins), The Man With Big Ears (HarperCollins), Jake Snake’s Race (HarperCollins), and more

POLITICAL CARTOONING Political cartoonist at The News and Obsever in Raleigh, NC and syndicated during the early 70’s. Today, syndicated in 750 publications 3-times a week with Cagle Cartoons.
FINE ART SHOWS Allied Artists of America, Salmagundi Club, Phillips Mill Annual (honorable mention), New Hope Shad Festival (grand Prize), Hunter Museum in Chattanooga ( one -man career retrospective), Santa Fe public library (one–man), Rosenfeld Gallery (Philadelphia), Potter’s House (DC), 7 A Gallery (NYC), P.A.C.A. Gallery ( one-man, NYC), Phebe’s Gallery (NYC, one-man), Princeton Art Association, 4-Corners Gallery (NJ), Rockbridge (VA) County Fair (2 second places and a third place in oil painting), and more. Opened Huffaker Gallery in Santa Fe, NM during 1991. QUOTES “Sandy is one of the heavies in cartooning in America his stuff can be devastating. His understanding of politics is amazing.” Eric Seidman, New York Times Art Director
People Magazine “Huffaker is an extraordinary artist. The soft gray shadows of his work hold a bizarre, blasphemous message: The world makes more sense when you look at it cockeyed.”
The News and Observer “We can scan our great concentrations of American humor in our avowed humor magazines, from the old Life, Puck and Judge to The New Yorker, but a similar review of our mutitudinous newspaper comic strips through the years will leave a different taste. We can jump from Alajalov to Dick Tracy, from Charles Dana Gibson to Horrible Hagar. We can sweep from The Katzenjammer Kids to Walt Disney, from The Wonder Clock to Krazy Kat and Donald Duck, and from Palmer Cox and Peter Newel to Al Hirschfeld, Sandy Huffaker, David Levine, Carol Anthony and R. Crumb, without straying beyond the bounds of American humor. In fact, what are its bounds?” Henry Pitz, 200 Years of American Illustration “Sandy Huffaker achieved star status as an illustrator/cartoonist. His works include six covers for Time Magazine, two covers for Sports Illustrated, and twelve covers for Business Week. Huffaker combines a biting humor with an uncanny ability to deoict a personality or strike a note of political truth. In the latter 1960’s, as a young, syndicated political cartoonist for the News and Observer in North Carolina, Huffaker, almost single handedly, championed liberal causes and anti-war convictions in a conservative environment. His sports cartoons for Sports Illustrated brought sports cartooning to a new level, synthesizing humorous portraits into amazingly intricate designs. Recently, Huffaker has turned his talents to painting, His wit, social conscience, and great technical skill are still there, along with a humanism that is sincere but not sentimental, His paintings of Haiti are telling portraits of troubled people in a troubled land. This is outstanding art by a very serious and special artist.”