The Art of the Knowing Glance: Mark Ulriksen's Most Iconic New Yorker Covers

Mark Ulriksen's June 2026 New Yorker cover, "Kings of New York," is exactly what you would expect from a man who has painted over seventy of them. He takes Jalen Brunson and places him alongside Patrick Ewing, Walt Frazier, and Willis Reed in an imagined alternate-universe Knicks lineup. Warm, celebratory, unmistakably his.

It is another great cover from someone who has been producing them for thirty years. Here is where some of the others landed.

Watch Your Back Mountain (February 27, 2006)

This is the cover that defined Ulriksen's place in political illustration. In February 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington while quail hunting in Texas. The White House's handling of the incident was widely mocked. Ulriksen's response ran the following week.

He painted Cheney and President George W. Bush as cowboys, posing in the style of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, which had just won three Academy Awards two weeks prior. Cheney holds a smoking shotgun. Bush lurks nervously behind him.

The American Society of Magazine Editors gave it the 2006 Best News Magazine Cover award and said the image "evokes both the smugness of a vice president implicated in catastrophe and the cluelessness of a president incapable of stopping him."

What made it work was the layering. It was a political comment, a pop culture reference, and a visual joke, all in a single acrylic painting on paper. The cover required no caption, no explanation. Anyone who saw it in 2006 understood immediately.

Childless Cat Lady Inexplicably Enjoying Life (September 16, 2024)

During the 2024 presidential campaign, JD Vance's 2021 remarks about "childless cat ladies" resurfaced in the national conversation. Vance had suggested that women without children were "miserable at their own lives" and implied a moral hierarchy between parents and those who chose not to have them.

Ulriksen's response for the Fall Books issue was a woman alone in a warm room, surrounded by cats, absorbed in reading. She looks peaceful. The title does the rest.

"I know so many single women who favor felines, including our eldest daughter," Ulriksen said. "And yet they all persist in being happy. Go figure."

The cover went viral in the weeks before the election. What separated it from typical political commentary was the absence of anger. The woman on the cover was not responding to Vance. She had not noticed him. That choice was more pointed than any counterargument could have been.

Hitting Forty (April 8, 2013)

The 2013 New York Yankees arrived at spring training with a payroll north of $200 million and a roster that read like a sports medicine intake form. Derek Jeter was coming off ankle surgery. Alex Rodriguez, Curtis Granderson, and Mark Teixeira were all injured before the season began.

Ulriksen painted the entire team lined up for a portrait: some in slings, some on crutches, one in a wheelchair, several with canes and walkers. It is one of the funniest sports images in New Yorker history, and it holds up because it is accurate. The 2013 Yankees used 60 players due to injury, a franchise record at the time.

The cover also captures something Ulriksen does better than almost anyone: he finds the humor in a situation that is genuinely absurd, and he does not oversell it. The players have their dignified team photo expressions intact. They are just also in medical equipment.

Crazy Time (March 25, 2019)

Brexit had been grinding on for nearly three years when Ulriksen was asked to make sense of it. His solution was to replace Big Ben with a cuckoo clock, the cuckoo mid-spring, the clock clearly having lost its mind.

"The British icon that most resonates with me is Big Ben," Ulriksen said. "Upon realizing that, a bell rang in my head, a cuckoo clock."

The cover ran in March 2019, when Parliament had voted down Theresa May's withdrawal agreement twice and no one could articulate what would happen next. The cuckoo clock captured something that thousands of words of analysis had not: the situation was structurally deranged. The clock had broken and was announcing the hour anyway.

Towering Wealth (October 21, 2019)

The Money issue. Ulriksen turned his attention to Manhattan's supertall luxury towers, the so-called "pencil buildings" that had risen along 57th Street and the southern edge of Central Park over the previous decade. The cover ran alongside a 13,000-word investigation into Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

He painted the towers mid-construction, scaffolded, surrounded by cranes, in a state of perpetual incompletion that felt accurate to the genre. Many of these buildings were purchased as investment vehicles rather than residences. Some of their floors sat empty for years.

The cover said what the money issue's reporting said, but in a single image: the city was being built for people who did not plan to live in it.

The Long Game

After more than thirty years and seventy covers, Ulriksen's signature is not a style so much as a disposition. He does not rage. He does not lecture. He finds the single image that makes you feel something before you have read a word, and then he gets out of the way.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. He lives in Cole Valley, San Francisco, and the Knicks cover is just the latest proof that he has not lost the instinct.