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O J A I M AG A Z I N E | FALL 2025
C
hristopher Noxon’s chromatic awakening has been in progress since inception — but in the wake of a tragedy, it cascaded out into horizons unearthed. “I’ve always thought really visually,” Noxon said. “I loved to draw pictures, which my grandma used to call ‘busy pictures.’ So I would sit on the floor and draw maps with mountains and cities and little farms and cowboys and spaceships and all kinds of stuff.” As an adult, having cultivated a background in print journalism — inspired in part by watching Lou Grant as a child — Noxon created three books of his own. In Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook, published in early 2019, Noxon illustrates the faces of the Civil Rights Movement, inspired by a trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. “I talked to people who’d been involved in the movement, drew them, and then drew the places that they were,” he said. “So it was kind of part reporting, part drawing, part meditation. I was trying to figure out ways to sort of get around the intellectual defenses. I feel like our ideology and our values can get sort of set, and we get kind of in a rut. … And for some reason, art and pictures have a way of sort of subverting that, getting around it and speaking to you in a kind of pre-logical way. … I’m a thinker, constantly processing, but I’m also a feeler. And as I get older, that seems to me, way more important.” He said his first book, Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up, “was all about adults who act like kids. … I love to play, and I’ve never really been interested in capital A adulthood.
by MIMI WALKER
As above, so below, in living color.
CHRiSTOpHeR NOXOn's Busy BrusH Goes Here, THeRe AnD EverYwHeRe