Carving out a pathway to justice

For Joe Boruchow, art and justice are intertwined. His passionate views about social justice inspire his unique artwork made from carving intricate patterns, scenes or portraits from sheets of black paper.

By KATHY BOCCELLA

“That’s been my process,” he said in a second floor room that serves as both art and music studio in the Germantown home where he lives with his wife and five-year-old son. “There’s a symbiosis between the two.”

For nearly 20 years, his black-and-white cutouts, no bigger than a sandwich, have been transformed into posters, large-scale public art murals, and gallery installations that now sell for up to $10,000. They’ve been plastered on telephone poles, mailboxes, old buildings, SEPTA bus shelters - whose advertising windows he opened with a gadget jury-rigged by a friend. One of the most prominent sat across from the Union League on South Broad Street, showing a Confederate flag and a suited figure fleeing with a suitcase full of cash, while figures toil below in the subway.

In taking the spirit of activism and applying it to his art, Boruchow has blurred the thin black lines between the two.

For his latest cause, the war in Ukraine, he is selling T-shirts with a cutout of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and plans to donate the money to Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit that supports democracy and human rights. In the picture, Zelenskyy stands in Kyiv’s central plaza with “Would Not Leave His City” written at the bottom.

“I really believe this is a fight for liberal democracy and it’s a thing that’s going to define the way the world goes in the next 50 years, whether we’re going to have an autocratic supremacy for the next 50 years,” he said. “We should go all in on Putin. He’s our era’s Hitler.”

For Boruchow, the Russian dictator is the lat-

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Near est in a rogue’s gallery of leaders he’s attacked in previous works. The strength of his political convictions has driven his art and life since he was a child, the son of psychiatrist parents, who grew up in Arlington, Va.

Meeting a mentor

His father was an art collector who took him on buying trips to galleries. When he was about 12 he got to meet one of his heroes, pop artist Keith Haring whose social activism around AIDS and safe sex drove his later work, and who inspired Boruchow’s first public art project when he copied Haring’s famous Free South Africa print and plastered it around his school. The artist, who died in 1990, gave him a