Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

Artists from the issue who attended the event included Diana Sofia Lozano, Laurie Kang, fields harrington, André Magaña, Alexander Si, Tiffany Sia, Kristi Cavataro, and Ronny Quevedo.

The artists spoke about their work in a panel discussion with Art in America Associate Editor Emily Watlington, who was introduced by Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas and Publisher Erica Lubow Necarsulmer. The event was presented in partnership with sister publication Robb Report, and featured sushi and passed canapes from Rhubarb Hospitality Collection.

For years, Art in America‘s First Look section has featured new artists before they became well known in the art community. Last year, the magazine revamped its historic new talent issue for its May/June 2021 edition, dedicating that entire issue to featuring up and coming talent.

With the issue available now, readers can learn about Liao Wen, one of China’s most innovative young women artists, and her semi-abstract sculptures centered on the human body. The magazine also features a profile on artist Alexander Si, who researches the impact of technology and media, and on Toronto-based artist Laurie Kang, who creates works best described as self-critical photographs without images.

There is so much more to learn about the artists featured in the issue.

Artists featured in Art in America‘s New Talent Issue sit for a panel discussion.

Guests sit and listen to artists featured in Art in America‘s New Talent issue speak during a panel discussion.

“I’m really proud of having revitalized this title, which is more than a century old,” Smith said in a phone interview on Monday. “Bringing in dozens of new writers and a more diverse writer base is the legacy I’m proudest of.”

He also singled out themed issues focused on Indigenous art and realism, from 2017 and 2020, respectively, as being some of the greatest achievements of his tenure at Art in America. “I really see Art in America in print as not just responding to a conversation that is happening in the art world, but really driving that conversation, and our big thematic issues were maybe the biggest ways that we were able to do that,” he said.

Smith first began at Art in America in 2013 as associated editor, and was ultimately promoted to editor in 2017. Prior to Art in America, he became a founding editor of Triple Canopy, a magazine that hosts digital artworks and writings, in 2007.

Smith’s next move will see him taking a newly created position at a museum that is yet to open. He will take up the role of head of digital and editorial content at the M+, which is currently set to open in the fall of this year. In his new post, Smith work within the museum’s curatorial department, and he will be based in Hong Kong.

“I’m really excited about this publishing, and digital publishing in particular, is going to be a crucial way of bringing the scholarship, knowledge, and art that is in M+ to a global audience,” he said.

To celebrate the relaunch of the publication’s website, we look back at the milestones that helped define critical thinking in the United States and abroad.

1913
January: The art critic, historian, and collector Frederic Fairchild Sherman publishes the first issue of Art in America. Although the magazine is founded in the watershed year that brought Marcel Duchamp and other European modernist pioneers to the Armory Show, early volumes focus on the old masters in American collections and, to a lesser extent, American folk art. Founding editor Wilhelm R. Valentiner models the magazine after German academic journals. Prominent contributors in the early years include art historians Wilhelm von Bode and Bernard Berenson.

January 1913

1921
April: In a virtuosic feat of connoisseurship, American art historian A. Kingsley Porter argues for the attribution of a small 15th-century statuette of a nude youth in a private New York collection to the Sienese sculptor Giacomo Cozzarelli.

1923
For most of the decade, the magazine is titled Art in America and Elsewhere. The augmented title reflects the predominance of articles on European and Asian art as well as long-standing questions about the meaning of “American art” and how A.i.A.’s identity should be defined.

October: In a monographic article, Valentiner discusses the 14th-century Sienese sculptor Tino di Camaino.

1930
February: Berenson announces the discovery of a previously unknown Masaccio painting in Florence. The find is so significant that Berenson feels compelled to violate his personal prohibition against writing about artworks currently on the market: “I am so eager to communicate to my fellow students the discovery of a Madonna hitherto unknown but manifestly by Masaccio that I do not hesitate to break the rule of a lifetime.”

1937
January: Frank Jewett Mather Jr., a prolific critic and Princeton scholar of Renaissance art, publishes a study of Maestro Fredi da Siena. Mather’s 1936 book on Venetian painting is also reviewed favorably in the magazine, which notes the author’s “hearty relish of the erotic aspects” of his subject.

1940
April: Writing on Albert Bierstadt’s paintings of the American West, art historian Benjamin Poff Draper describes how the Hudson River School artist brought “the first real visual pictures of the wild scenery to a wondering Eastern population.”

1941
Jean Lipman, an authority on American folk art and, later, a contemporary art collector, becomes editor of the magazine, a position that she will hold until 1971. The year Lipman takes over, the magazine has 199 subscribers; by 1970 the circulation will top 65,000.

1945
July: In a rare article on modern art, collector A. Reynolds Morse champions Salvador Dalí. The artist, he writes, is “able to present to America the very essence of [itself], ennobled by the full effect of his intricate personal symbology.” The article is illustrated with Dalí paintings from Morse’s own collection, which will later become the basis of the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.

1951
October: A special issue edited by Howard University professor James A. Porter examines the work of African American painter Robert S. Duncanson.

1952
Spring: Critic Elizabeth McCausland pens an essay on Marsden Hartley. Other issues that year focus on the work of early American painters Junius R. Sloan (Summer) and Edward Savage (Autumn).

1954
As the ambition and stature of American art grow, contemporary art and architecture become the magazine’s primary focus.

Winter: A recurring feature on new talent is introduced. A mainstay of A.i.A. until 1966, the section presents work by emerging artists such as Donald Judd, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Bontecou, Jay DeFeo, and Larry Rivers, as well as a host of artists who are less prominent today, including Robert Eshoo, Guy Palazzola, Easton Pribble, and Jack Squier.

December: In “The Artist and the Public,” a statement about modern art and alienation, New York School painter Adolph Gottlieb writes, “Young artists find themselves helpless in a brutally predatory society.” In the same issue, Yale architecture professor Vincent J. Scully Jr. discusses buildings by Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Paul Schweikher, linking their modern designs to classical archetypes.

1960
Number 2: Critics from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the USSR, and Yugoslavia are invited to give an “International Look at the USA.” Porter A. McCray, director of the international program at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, remarks that “the projection of American art before a large international audience coincided with this country’s emergence from isolationism and with the general realization that henceforth the United States was to play a leading role in the world’s political arena.”

1963
Number 2: Robert Indiana, Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, and other artists are commissioned to design coins or decks of playing cards as part of an “Art for Everyday Living” feature. “The editors of this magazine believe that the best artists of our time should be involved in the everyday life of the people,” an unsigned editorial explains, “and that this concept should be encouraged by our government.”

Number 4: In “Folklore of the Banal,” contributing editor Dorothy Gees Seckler describes Pop art as “the provocative new realism,” a burgeoning movement in American art that could “topple” Abstract Expressionism by “delivering images straight from the supermarket and dinette, the funny papers, and billboard advertising.”

1964 No. 2

1964
The list of “editorial consultants” on the magazine’s masthead includes art world luminaries such as MoMA director of collections Alfred H. Barr Jr., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Thomas M. Messer, MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller, and Whitney Museum of American Art director Lloyd Goodrich.

Number 2: Roy Lichtenstein designs “Pop Panorama” covers evoking the 1964 World’s Fair for a New York–themed issue. A figure on the back cover wearing a gas mask exclaims, “Great Rings of Saturn!!”

Number 3: The cover of a special issue on West Coast art features an abstract painting by Billy Al Bengston. John Coplans, then on the editorial staff of California-based Artforum, writes that while San Francisco retains “a blandly concealed hostility” toward modern art, Los Angeles is emerging as an art center “where the artists have developed an aggressive and high-spirited arrogance that only young and talented men can have.”

1965
October-November: Contributing editor Barbara Rose’s essay “ABC Art” is among the first and most influential critical analyses of Minimalism. Commenting on the style’s psychological aspects, Rose writes, “One might as easily construe the new, reserved impersonality and self-effacing anonymity as a reaction against the self-indulgence of an unbridled subjectivity, just as one might see it in terms of a formal reaction to the excesses of painterliness.”

1966
September-October: A special feature on “The New Whitney” includes a celebration of the Marcel Breuer–designed building by architect and critic Peter Blake, who deems it “an insult to the Madison Avenue of the grey flannel suit” as well as “a forward assault-position for America’s artists and a fortress for the consolidation of their gains.”

1967
January-February: In an attempt to define the “Sensibility of the Sixties,” Barbara Rose and art historian Irving Sandler send a questionnaire about the general conditions of contemporary art to 35 American artists, including Dan Flavin, Robert Motherwell, and George Segal. In his response, Carl Andre reflects: “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us.”

January-February 1968

1968
January-February: For a special issue on “The New Combine” of art and technology, critic Douglas M. Davis describes a “new sense of exhilaration and discovery” among artists like Nam June Paik, Larry Bell, Les Levine, and others living in America’s “supertechnological society.”

July-August: The highlight of a 34-page report on 300 years of American printmaking is an original lithograph created for A.i.A. by Larry Rivers. One of the magazine’s earliest artist projects, the inserted work, A Hut Can Be a Hairdo, presents a voluminous bright purple mound that doubles as both a house and a hairstyle for a female figure.

1969
January-February: In the midst of the Vietnam War, A.i.A. examines the role that crisis plays in artistic creation. In “Violence and Art,” critic Charlotte Willard theorizes: “Violence in life is mirrored by violence in art, for art draws its being from life as a child from its mother’s womb.”

1970
Whitney Communications Corporation, headed by investor, publisher, art collector, and sportsman John Hay Whitney, assumes ownership of the magazine.

November-December: Using a Polaroid camera, Lucas Samaras acts as photographer, model, and editor for an A.i.A. artist project, creating a series of experimental self-portraits titled “Autopolaroid.”

May/June 1971

1971
March-April: Artist, critic and novelist Brian O’Doherty begins his editorship of A.i.A. with a pessimistic note assessing “the current failure of confidence in art.” He predicts “a new conservatism” in the ’70s as a reaction to ’60s activism. Nevertheless, under O’Doherty’s direction, A.i.A. takes a more radical tone. The “Issues and Commentary” section that he introduces becomes a forum for critical writing about economics, politics, and art institutions.

May-June: In a special section on Andy Warhol, published in conjunction with his retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, critic Mary Josephson describes Warhol as an example “of the artist as perfect medium-both in the spiritualist and artistic sense.”

September-October: Critic Deborah Jowitt explores avant-garde choreography in “Post-Judson Dance,” singling out Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, and Meredith Monk for the “new opaqueness” of their experimental pieces.

1973
November-December: Eleanor Antin discusses fellow Southern California artist Ed Ruscha’s “phenomenological concerns with the nature of reading,” and casts him as the embodiment of his city’s culture, asking, “Is ‘Ruscha’ Los Angeles, the way ‘Lorca’ is Seville?”

Interviewed about Marcel Duchamp in the same issue, John Cage describes their shared attempts to “blur the distinctions between art and life.” He also observes that Duchamp “spoke constantly against the retinal aspects of art, whereas I have insisted upon the physicality of sound and the activity of listening.”

1974
March-April: Elizabeth C. Baker, former managing editor at Art News, debuts as A.i.A. editor with an issue that features Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (ca. 1918) on the cover with an accompanying article about the Russian artist by Donald Judd. During her 34-year tenure, Baker will develop A.i.A.‘s signature mix of news, criticism, historical articles, and regional and international reports.

September-October: In a bombshell article, art historian Rosalind Krauss accuses the executors of David Smith’s estate, among them critic Clement Greenberg and artist Robert Motherwell, of neglecting the sculptor’s work or even deliberately stripping paint from some pieces to suit their “taste for the monochrome of unadorned metal.”

1976
May-June: A special section on feminist art includes “Women’s Art in the ’70s” by critic and curator Lawrence Alloway as well as contributing editor Lucy R. Lippard’s “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art.” Aiming to “provoke thought and discussion about sexual and gender-oriented uses of the body in Conceptual Art by women,” Lippard discusses work by artists such as Rebecca Horn, Joan Jonas, Marina Abramović, and Adrian Piper.

July-August: Art historian Donald B. Kuspit’s “Regionalism Reconsidered” proposes a critical framework for reevaluating regional American art, offering “a positive view of the provincial spirit.” The issue also includes a “Letter from Chicago” by senior editor Peter Schjeldahl, among other reports on activities outside of New York and Los Angeles.

1978
January-February: Artist Robert Morris reflects on the temporal experience of Minimalist sculpture, architecture, and earthworks in “The Present Tense of Space.” Morris’s elliptical essay concludes that “if mental space is the conscious analogue-metaphor for the world from the reconstitutive ‘me’ point of view, then the experience of the work under examination lies outside this, prior to fixed memory images.”

November-December: Art historian Leo Steinberg publishes the first of two articles on the place of Picasso’s Three Women (1908) in the history of Cubism and the artist’s relationship to Cézanne. Steinberg’s argument prompts a polemical exchange with MoMA curator William Rubin in the following year’s April-May issue.

1979
January-February: Lambasting the first exhibition of Richard Avedon’s fashion photography in a much-hyped exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, senior editor Roberta Smith says of the photographs: “they look more like posters than art and frequently make one wince for Avedon.” In the “Issues and Commentary” section, New York Times reporter Grace Glueck discusses the National Endowment for the Arts’s new “challenge grants,” a publicly funded program that elicits matching funds from private sources.

May-June: Rosalind Krauss diagrams an “expanded field” of sculpture in “John Mason and Post-Modernist Sculpture: New Experiences, New Words.” Krauss develops her theory further in a 1979 issue of October, the journal she cofounded.

December 1980

1980
Architecture critic Martin Filler publishes a series of articles on contemporary architects, including Robert Venturi (April), Richard Meier (May), Frank Gehry (Summer), Michael Graves (September), Charles Moore (October), and Peter Eisenman (November).

September: Jeffrey Deitch, identified in A.i.A. as an investment adviser and recipient of a 1979 NEA art critics fellowship, reports on the “brash new-wave/no-wave artworks” in the sprawling “Times Square Show.” He argues that Collaborative Projects, Inc. (aka CoLab), which organized the show, represents a “post-SoHo phenomenon, a reaction to the clogged channels and art-for-art’s sake orientation of the post-Minimalist academy.”

December: A special issue grows out of a symposium organized in conjunction with MoMA’s Picasso retrospective. Participants include critics Lawrence Alloway and Clement Greenberg, and artists Eric Fischl, Joseph Kosuth, Elizabeth Murray, and Ed Ruscha.

1981
March: Associate editor Craig Owens examines the work of artist Laurie Anderson. In live performances mediated by electronic equipment, Owens argues, Anderson “shows us a world denatured by technology, and self fragmented, pluralized, and thus dispossessed by its own representations.”

October: Robert Hobbs, the chief curator of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art from August to December 1978, discusses the cultural roots of the Iranian revolution, an event which deepened his understanding of art as “a communal means of structuring identity, whether the identity be family, tribe, city, or nation.”

November 1982

1982
The Annual Guide to Galleries, Museums and Artists, a nationwide directory, is introduced.

November: In “Subversive Signs,” associate editor Hal Foster examines how artists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer use words and phrases as “weapons,” prompting the viewer to become “an active reader of messages more than a contemplator of the esthetic.”

1984
The magazine is purchased by Peter M. Brant.

Summer: “Slouching Toward Avenue D” by artist Walter Robinson and critic Carlo McCormick characterizes the East Village as New York’s  “newest bohemian efflorescence.” A polemical response by senior editor Craig Owens, “The Problem with Puerilism,” dismisses the scene as “a culture-industry outpost.”

1985

May 1987

April: Anthropologist James Clifford and art historian Yve-Alain Bois respond critically to MoMA’s exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,” which examines connections between European modernism and tribal art from Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific. Clifford writes: “The MoMA show succeeds in demonstrating, not any essential affinity between tribal and modern, but rather the desire and power of the modern West to collect the world.”

In the same issue, literary critic Paul Smith celebrates the exhibition “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality,” at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, as “the first major attempt in America to take stock of the history and heritage of what is a crucial but underestimated aspect of contemporary art practice.” Invoking Lacanian analysis as a critical framework, the exhibition includes work by Mary Kelly, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and Silvia Kolbowski.

1987
May: Following Andy Warhol’s death, a special section features art historian Thomas Crow’s essay “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” along with tributes to the late artist from friends such as art historian Kenneth E. Silver, artist Larry Rivers, and critic David Bourdon.

June: Architecture critic Reyner Banham considers the Renzo Piano–designed addition to Houston’s Menil Collection. The reductive steel frame allows the building to blend into its surrounding suburban neighborhood, Banham argues, while the double curved ceiling panels filter in the optimal amount of natural light. “It all looks very simple . . . but simpleminded it is not.”

July 1988

1988
May: In a section on “Consumerist Art,” Roberta Smith describes how Jeff Koons creates a “dazzling visual and conceptual equilibrium” in his “art-about-art-about-consumerism.” Frequent contributor Holland Cotter discusses Haim Steinbach’s shelf pieces, and curator David Joselit connects Koons, Steinbach, and others to a politicized Conceptualist tradition.

July: Writing in the first of two landmark “Art and Money” issues (followed by July 1990), contributing editor Carter Ratcliff argues that “our persistent habit of trying to separate market value from esthetic value is misguided, like the struggle to extricate a picture’s content from its form.” In interviews with Ratcliff, prominent dealers such as Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Paula Cooper, and Larry Gagosian attest to a booming art market.

October: Dance critic Joan Acocella examines the “genuinely postmodern” work of 32-year-old choreographer and dancer Mark Morris. “Though Morris’s dancers have hard things to do,” she remarks, “the look is one of ordinary movement-matter-of-fact, unmannered, with full weight, as if they were running to catch a bus.”

1989
May: Art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh interviews Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of the exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette. Conceived in part as a reaction to MoMA’s 1984 “‘Primitivism'” show, “Magiciens” gives equal weight to works both from well-known global “centers” and from the “margins.” Martin says, “I oppose the idea that one can only look at another culture to exploit it.”

July: “The Global Issue” heralds an international, decentralized art world. James Clifford, Boris Groys, Craig Owens, Martha Rosler, Robert Storr, and Michele Wallace participate in a symposium, offering responses to the prompt: “Does the advent of a ‘new global postmodern visual culture’ mean the end of local or regional specificity?”

July 1989

1990
December: In cooperation with other arts and culture magazines, A.i.A. publishes a section of activist art collective Group Material’s AIDS Timeline. Made for Day Without Art 1990, a project by the nonprofit group Visual AIDS, the timeline includes medical facts, a history of political actions, and documentation of community activities, interspersed with works by artists including Kay Rosen and Louise Lawler.

1994
June: Marking the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Holland Cotter interviews 12 artists about the gay rights movement and queer identity. Ross Bleckner sees his sexuality as inextricably linked to his art: “My work is really about painting and painting is really about identity and identity, for me, is really about being gay.”

October: In “A Year in the Life: Tropic of Painting,” critic Jerry Saltz provides a taxonomy of work presented in New York’s 1993–94 season, confirming the surprisingly healthy status of what he calls the “main currency of the art world”—painting. His “Big Cats” of the medium are led by Gerhard Richter. Saltz also discusses Patricia Cronin, Mira Schor, and Rita Ackermann under the rubric “Our Bodies, Our Selves, You Asshole.”

1995
March: Contributing editor Linda Nochlin reviews the Whitney Museum’s “Black Male” show, which surveys how images of African American men are treated in the work of artists such as Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Adrian Piper, and Leon Golub. Nochlin: “The works call into question the vicious tradition of stereotype and caricature, omnipresent in both high and popular art but most widely visible in mass culture.”

December: Critic Robert Atkins presents his “guide to the exploding online art world” in “The Art World & I Go On Line.” A pioneering embrace of networked technologies, the article contains details that now seem quaint. Educating readers about search engines, Atkins identifies Lycos, WebCrawler, and InfoSeek as the “three giants of the field.”

December 1995

1997
May: Thomas McEvilley, known for his critical focus on overlooked and under-appreciated art, examines works by African American artists from the South in “The Missing Tradition.” Citing the public’s “incomplete understanding of African American culture,” McEvilley questions why “one of the country’s premier painters,” self-taught Alabama artist Thornton Dial, “remains unknown to much of the mainstream art world.”

April 2000

1999
January: Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, senior editor Christopher Phillips reports on the first-ever Berlin Biennale, in which 70 percent of the participating artists are under 35. Highlights include a pair of massive stainless steel slides by Carsten Höller.

September: In “The Venice Biennale: Reformed, Renewed, Redeemed,” senior editor Marcia E. Vetrocq delivers an optimistic report on “the mother of all international art exhibitions.” Art world superstars Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois share the year’s Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement.

2000
April: Art historian Martha Buskirk considers the longevity of artworks that employ ephemeral materials in “Planning for Impermanence.” Citing examples like Kara Walker’s fragile, cut-paper installations and Eva Hesse’s latex and fiberglass sculptures, Buskirk wonders how conservators and collectors will delay the inevitable decay of such pieces over time.

December: Responding to the provocative exhibition “Posséder et Détruire” (Possess and Destroy) at Paris’s Musée du Louvre, art historians Linda Nochlin and Abigail Solomon-Godeau argue that a fundamental misogyny pervades the canon of Western art from Rembrandt to Delacroix to Picasso.

2002
January: In an interview with contributing editor Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter discusses his continual shifts between figuration and abstraction, and explains why he allows himself this stylistic freedom: “I always hated those artists who were so consistent and had this sort of unified development. . . . I never worked at painting as if it were a job; it was always out of interest or for fun, a desire to try something.”

May 2009

2004
June-July: A special section about contemporary art in China, featuring articles and interviews by writers such as Barbara Pollack and managing editor Richard Vine, briefs Western audiences on a dynamic art scene. Concepts of individual expression, government censorship, and urban demolition and expansion are explored in discussions of work by artists like Yang Fudong and Zhang Dali.

2008
September: Marcia E. Vetrocq, a senior editor at A.i.A., takes over as the magazine’s chief editor.

2009
March: A.i.A. launches artinamericamagazine.com.

April: Citing the human mind’s innate ability to process visual experience, critic Dave Hickey lauds the layered subtlety of formalism: “The primary virtue of formalism is that it allows you to see and hear patterns that were not put there, that only ended up there as a side effect of some other pattern more urgently desired.”

May: In his article “Provisional Painting,” critic Raphael Rubinstein examines the “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-canceling” style of artists like Raoul De Keyser and Christopher Wool.

2011
Lindsay Pollock, a former culture journalist at Bloomberg News, is named editor-in-chief of A.i.A.

October 2017

2013
To celebrate the magazine’s 100th anniversary, A.i.A. revives the tradition of publishing artist projects in its pages and commissions a series of covers designed by Ellsworth Kelly, Josh Smith, Sarah Sze, and others.

2017
October: A special issue, featuring a cover and interview by Edgar Heap of Birds, thoroughly rethinks questions raised by A.i.A.’s July-August 1972 focus on Native American art. Specialists such as curator Kathleen Ash-Milby and scholars Gerald McMaster and Jessica L. Horton discuss the Dakota Access Pipeline, museum decolonization, Indigenous spirituality, and various individual artists.

2018
January: William S. Smith, a senior editor at A.i.A., assumes the post of chief editor.

Penske Media Corporation, which encompasses twenty-two magazine titles and ten offices worldwide, acquires A.i.A. and begins to greatly enhance the publication’s digital activities, while maintaining its more than century-long print tradition.

But what may look from the outside like a standard design overhaul reflects a fundamental behind-the-scenes transformation. After more than a year of discussion, we’ve reset our priorities to establish a sustainable future for the kind of incisive critical writing A.i.A. has been publishing for more than a century. By joining with ARTnews on this new platform, we can reach an expanded audience without sacrificing the critical voice and analytical rigor that make A.i.A. distinct.

This publication is about art and artists, and we continually seek out writers whose ideas illuminate contemporary culture. That hasn’t changed. What’s different now is that we’re inviting more readers to understand why we are passionate about what we do. Investing in a new website isn’t merely an aesthetic choice. It’s a public argument that art criticism matters now—and that the potential audience for it is larger than ever before.

This relaunch has been a long time coming. Writing in a 1995 issue of A.i.A., Robert Atkins predicted that “future art historians will mark the 1994–95 season as the year the art world went on line.” He reported on his attempts as a critic to adapt to new formats like message boards and email:

“Art buffs with the requisite computer-and-modem hardware and Internet access could discuss the Whitney Biennial and Lacanian theory, inspect an international array of museum schedules, search the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA), and peruse auction prices from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. They could also view artworks—some for sale and others designed for electronic, interactive formats—by artists ranging from paleolithic daubers to Laurie Anderson.”

You can almost hear the crackle and squawk of a dial-up connection in Atkins’s description, but it’s also possible to discern the outline of the art publishing landscape we know now. The 1994–95 season may have been a momentous one for technological development in the art world at large, but it was not the year that Art in America actually went “on line.” In fact, it wasn’t until the start of the Obama administration that A.i.A. established a robust digital presence, and even then the publication operated primarily as a print magazine with a website on the side.

The reluctance to embrace digital publishing at the turn of the millennium might have meant going against the grain to some extent. Yet it also allowed A.i.A. to skip some of digital media’s growing pains: pixelated images, clunky web browsers, hastily written blogs, and comments sections that often looked like intellectual cesspools. Our cautious advance to the Web was also informed by legitimate skepticism: how would people get paid for their work if it was being given away for free? (It’s a question that could have gotten a publisher branded as a party-pooper during the dot-com years, but that publications and readers are now confronting with a more sober sensibility.)

Cover of the December 1995 issue of Art in America.

There was probably also a touch of snobbery in an art magazine’s anti-digital stance, the assumption that a rarefied discourse about recondite objects was most appropriately delivered in a gorgeous print object. I love our print publication. I’ve gushed about it—in print. Yet the Web vs. print divide that once seemed to hold existential implications now appears to be easily bridged. The relationship between formats is better understood as a continuum that also includes social media and live events. A publication is really the public it creates, and this new site is another step in the process of expanding the audience for art even beyond our current global readership.

We are investing in a thriving online platform because we think we can continue adding to a broad conversation about culture that’s been happening all around us and intersecting with the art world. Even as our online presence has been relatively muted and art criticism in general has begun to look like a niche practice, we’ve witnessed an explosive growth of other kinds of cultural criticism. Sophisticated discussions of television shows, for instance, sometimes borrow the analytical tools honed by art critics. Working within our narrow sphere, art critics have developed methods for assessing complex aesthetic objects that often trenchantly comment on or are directly connected to systems of real-world power. But it’s time to come out of the niche. We have a lot to say about questions central to the most pressing debates today, and we now have a larger megaphone with which to say it.

I want to thank everyone who worked on this project at Penske Media Corporation and my colleagues at ARTnews. Together, we have created what will be the primary online destination for criticism, analysis, and art world news.

William S. Smith.

©KATHERINE MCMAHON

Art in America magazine announced today that William S. Smith has been appointed editor, effective immediately. “For more than 100 years, Art in America has been the historic journal of record of our nation’s arts and culture,” said Peter M. Brant, owner of Art Media Holdings. “Under Will’s leadership and editorial vision and as a pioneer in the field of digital publishing, I’m confident Art in America will continue to connect with current readers, and appeal to a new generation of art lovers.”

(Art Media Holdings, LLC is also the parent company of ARTnews, as well as the publications Modern and The Magazine Antiques.)

Smith has been interim editor of the magazine since the departure of Lindsay Pollock, who stepped down in May after six years at the helm. He joined Art in America in 2013 as associate editor, and shortly thereafter became senior editor. In 2007, he became a founding editor of the online magazine Triple Canopy.

“I was intrigued to come from Triple Canopy, an innovative digital publishing platform, to the more traditional stalwart, Art in America,” Smith told ARTnews. He said that as editor he will be “connecting with the tradition of the magazine, as well as pointing the way forward.”

Art in America was founded in 1912; Smith is the magazine’s seventh editor. “The archive is one of its strongest components,” he said. He is particularly interested in the contributions it made to art history in the 1970s and ’80s, by writers like Brian O’Doherty, Craig Owens, and Linda Nochlin. “I want Art in America to continue to represent the kind of intellectual depth Nochlin brought to art criticism,” he said. “Going forward, we have to keep in touch with that. I want our audience to be able to engage with this intellectual tradition in new and innovative ways, whether online, in print, or through live events. I want the consistency and quality to be inherent in every interaction.”

Smith added that “it is imperative today to bring in as many perspectives as possible. Even more so than it has been in the past, Art in America will be a platform for a diverse range of voices.”

On October 12, Artists Space in Manhattan hosted “Without Us There Is No You,” a launch event for A.i.A’s October issue on contemporary Indigenous art. The curatorial duo Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, aka Native Art Department International, curated a screening of works by Indigenous artists. They were later joined in a conversation by author and University of Delaware assistant professor Jessica L. Horton, who contributed an article to the issue on media art and environmental activism. The videos on the program were: Ginger Dunnill, Dylan McLaughlin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, In Transition Is the Most Honest. CauseLines (2017); Indigenous Media Rising (Jade Begay), Bayou Bridge Pipeline—The Tail End of the Black Snake (2016); Caroline Monnet, Mobilize (2015); Sterlin Harjo, Ordinary Human Being (2017); Sky Hopinka, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017); and Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm (Mique’l Dangeli) and Tim-kyo’o’hl Hayats’kw (Nick Dangeli), Aks Gyigyiinwaxl (Water Prayer), 2016. All the works shown address struggles for self-determination and land rights in Indigenous communities in the face of climate change, particularly in relation to the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation. Below is an edited transcript of the discussion.

JASON LUJAN  We were asked to select work related to Indigenous activism and Land art. In making our choices, we were thinking about how current these videos are. Most of them were finished only a few days ago. The first video, CauseLines, was finished Sunday night. Jessica highlights the Winter Count art collective in her article, and this work is by the founding members. It’s almost an update of what she wrote about.

JESSICA L. HORTON  That’s very true. CauseLines is the second in what I imagine is going to be a series of collaborative works from Winter Count, which formed in the fall of 2016 as a creative response to the mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline. All these videos bear out that the global media coverage of Standing Rock crystallized a much longer story-the Indigenous resistance, the struggle over land rights and ecological devastation writ large.

This spring I taught a course on the art history of the environmental movement. The semester began right after Trump issued the final permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline, so I wanted to introduce a work that would immediately put the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and climate change into my students’ minds. Winter Count’s first video, We Are in Crisis, did that in a really interesting way. Like CauseLines, it features appropriated drone footage. Drones are a military-industrial technology designed to surveil, target, and kill usually non-white bodies. So what does it mean to take that footage and recontextualize it? As you saw today, the makers added songs and stories. For me, that clarifies something that all these videos do. They critique colonization and the devastation it causes to land and people, but they also suggest that there has to be something more. They ask how we can reinvest, creatively and critically, in alternative ways of being. They ask how we can inhabit a world that is shaped by colonization but is not reducible to it.

MARIA HUPFIELD  In putting together this program, which involved thinking about Jessica’s article and the works she mentioned, we wanted to convey that a lot has happened since Standing Rock. We talked with the artists about some of the developments. Sterlin Harjo was at Standing Rock and took a lot of footage, then later reflected on the idea of the human. So we considered how we could make the story accessible and open it up, make it more than just an Indian issue.

LUJAN  Maria and I were concerned about the emphasis on the rural. We’re in New York City, so we tried to find videos that speak to an urban setting as well. Everything that Jessica just mentioned about colonization and taking the resources is also happening in urban spaces. The problem isn’t necessarily about extracting stuff from the ground, but it is a very relatable experience for anyone who lives in New York or other large urban centers.

HUPFIELD  When I look at the videos again, particularly the ones by Sky Hopinka and the Dangelis, I’m reminded of the time that goes into things, how foreign the Native languages spoken in them sound, and all the effort that has to be given to cultural revitalization and linguistic revitalization. These films speak to the acts of generosity that we have to impart to each other in order to reach a place of understanding and connection.

HORTON  One thing I was struck by-and this relates to your urban comment-is how important movement is as both a theme and an aesthetic mode in all of these videos. It doesn’t matter whether the movement results from a shaky handheld camera following bodies moving through the land, or whether it’s from shooting on a boat in water or while riding the “iron steed,” as the man calls his bicycle in Sterlin Harjo’s film. The works all highlight how forms of movement are politically and culturally very different. There are forced displacements of colonization that link climate refugees to the Trail of Tears, which is a point made strongly in the Bayou Bridge video. But movement can also be a way of connecting people and places-through the wandering that happens in Sky Hopinka’s Anti-Objects, for instance, or through the migrations from northern regions to southern Canada in Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize.

LUJAN  You can see that in footage from forty years ago in Mobilize.

HUPFIELD  The final video [Aks Gyigyiinwaxl (Water Prayer)] was a kind of prayer made in collaboration between a mother and a son, and it worked around language and water. So, for me, that was a nice place to end everything.

WILLIAM S. SMITH  When we were researching this issue, the question of sovereignty came up again and again. There are several ways of understanding it: from cultural to political, especially when it related to claims of land. I wonder how you see the question of sovereignty and assertions of sovereignty playing out in the films screened tonight.

HUPFIELD  I haven’t really thought so specifically about sovereignty in that way for the videos this evening. Each of the works is specific to the people and the nations they’re coming from. We’re not seeing a pan-Indian approach, we’re seeing very specific individuals and nations. In the case of Winter Count, the collective has both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members. It’s multi-racial. So sovereignty can mean that there’s a strong sense of who people are and where they’re coming from.

HORTON  There’s also that expansive sense of generosity, the irreducible connections that still happen across borders. Sometimes ecological conversations can go too far into the language of cosmic prayer, and seem to wrap the world into a seamless set of interconnections. I think sovereignty necessarily puts a boundary around that. It says, no, there have to be spaces for cultural and political difference, especially in places continually under the onslaught of colonization, which is not over. It’s a lot to ask of a particular artwork to do all of that at once. I think the generosity of these films came through in a really strong way, whatever the differences among them.

Vincent Fremont, a cofounder of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been named CEO of ARTnews Ltd., the parent company of this magazine. “This is an exciting new chapter for me,” Fremont said. “There’s a remarkable opportunity here to build upon the rich editorial heritage of Art in America, ARTnews, The Magazine Antiques and Modern, while enhancing the company’s digital offerings and spearheading new initiatives.”

In naming Fremont to the post, the company’s board chairman, Dan Gardner, noted: “Fremont is a widely respected 40-year veteran of the New York contemporary art scene, dating back to his days working alongside Andy Warhol. We are thrilled to have his experience and vision at the helm overseeing our U.S. business.”

Fremont helped found the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., following the artist’s death in 1987. He served as the foundation’s exclusive sales agent for Warhol paintings, drawings and sculptures from 1991 to 2010. Before the artist’s death, Fremont was vice president of Andy Warhol Enterprises and executive manager of the Andy Warhol studio. He co-directed and co-produced the documentary film Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story (2000) with his wife, Shelly Dunn Fremont.

Peter M. Brant, chairman of Brant Publications, Inc., the controlling shareholder of ARTnews Ltd.’s parent company, Artnews S.A., stated: “Vincent’s strategic business acumen, along with his dedicated commitment to the arts, makes him the perfect choice as CEO. He brings years of experience working with artists, art dealers and writers, and will be a tremendous asset to the media company.”

Fremont will lead the company forward, focusing on a cohesive strategy for the four titles following a 2015 merger. Each print publication will retain its identity, brand and editorial content. Fremont will develop synergies to build readership, revenue and digital offerings.

A.i.A. commissioned New York-based design firm Project Projects, winner of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in the category of communications design, to create the cover for the 2015 Guide to Museums, Galleries and Artists, on newsstands now. Since its foundation in 2004, the multidisciplinary studio has grown to encompass a downtown exhibition space that has housed the galleries K. and  P!, directed by Prem Krishnamurthy, and the publishing house Inventory Press, led by Adam Michaels. A.i.A. sat down with Krishnamurthy and associate principal Chris Wu in their Chinatown office to discuss their design, typographical focus and the imperfections of translation.

JULIA WOLKOFF  How did you approach designing the cover for the Annual Guide?

PREM KRISHNAMURTHY  We were interested in the fact that the magazine is called Art in America, but it obviously covers much more than that. An important starting point for us was discovering that in its early days, the magazine used to be titled Art in America and Elsewhere. It’s hard to talk about art in such a local, specific context anymore. Even conversations happening now around whether the Whitney Museum should be called by its full name, the Whitney Museum of American Art, seem anachronistic. Our very first idea was to try to complicate the situation and treat our design as a kind of intervention or hijacking that would superimpose another language and introduce questions of global communication onto the cover of the magazine.

WOLKOFF  Why did you choose Mandarin, as opposed to Arabic or another widely spoken language?

CHRIS WU  We actually tried an Arabic version but felt that it watered down the concept. I was born and raised in Taiwan and moved to New York 10 years ago. Mandarin is my mother tongue. With Chinese, we had the flexibility to play with the connotation behind the language. The translation is very specific. For example, A.i.A. has a title in mainland China, which has been used for a decade or two. In China, the title does not have a conjunction; it is American Art. We intentionally did not use this title, but instead made a literal translation. 

WOLKOFF  Translating Art in America back into English as American Art greatly changes the connotation of what the magazine is about. It localizes the magazine even more than the English title.

How did you come to the decision to use only text in your cover as opposed to any imagery?

KRISHNAMURTHY  As a studio, we tend to be very typographically driven. It’s interesting to think of text as a medium in the sense that the choice of typeface, the way in which type is set, communicates all of these nonverbal things.

WU  The typeface choice on the cover is also very straightforward. We made a specific decision to have it set in a serif typeface that relates to the Art in America masthead. Then the Chinese text is in a matching serif Chinese typeface. It’s an existing typeface. Although we did do quite a bit of detail modifications to get the overlapping correct.

WOLKOFF  The Mandarin and English characters seem to recede and come to the fore in equal measure, creating a duality between them. But the colors that you chose are straightforward and bright—there’s definitely no receding into the background. How did you come to choose neon green and hot pink?

KRISHNAMURTHY  Sometimes we start from exclusions. It was clear to us that we were not going to use any of the colors that are highly coded with China, like red. Then there was a set of criteria that those colors needed to achieve. In the two versions, the typography shifts between black and white. You have the black English typography and then the white Mandarin typography on the green cover, which is then reversed on the pink. We wanted two colors that would have a middle value where you could use both black and white on them. And also, we wanted the colors to be eye-catching and summery. We wanted them to have a vibrancy that would befit the content of the magazine.

WU  The bright, almost neon colors offset the traditional feeling of the serif typography. It was a very intentional decision based on both the restraints and the content. We could only do one Pantone (the green) and one CYMK full color (the pink).

WOLKOFF  In response to its Chinatown location, your galleries have put Chinese signage in the storefront and also worked with Chinese-speaking artists and exhibition designers. But the cover for A.i.A. is addressed to a national, even global audience, rather than a local one of passersby. How does multilingualism in design function differently in those contexts?

KRISHNAMURTHY  It’s happenstance. The reason why P! had its mission statement in Chinese as well as English is because it’s located in Chinatown. If we weren’t in Chinatown, and there wasn’t a significant population of Chinese people walking down the street, then I wouldn’t have done that.

We’re assuming that most of the people who buy the magazine do not speak Mandarin and don’t read Chinese. In that case, it’s working as a way to make people consider what it means for the magazine to be “art in America” and how we think about art in 2015 in a global context. On the other hand, in an ideal world, maybe there will be people who would normally not be interested in the magazine because they think of it as being geared towards a very specific audience or subject, who might now think of it slightly differently. Hopefully it gives people another way to think about the magazine and its constituencies.

WU  I can’t really speak for the gallery, but the way that we think of multilingualism is based on our audience and the purpose of the design. We always feel that it’s more interesting and challenging to work on design projects that include multiple languages. We put them on a 1:1 scale. There’s no hierarchy. We did a project in Istanbul which had a lot of Turkish language in it. Then we did projects in Montreal and in Europe and they always had French or German or Dutch. The multilingual is a very important part of how we handle or come up with design solutions.

WOLKOFF  How do you feel that translation functions in art and design?

KRISHNAMURTHY  Design is mediation but it’s also an act of translation; it’s taking a set of ideas or text or images from one context and making it accessible to a new audience through the way they are presented and disseminated. On the other hand, translation is nearly always imperfect. There’s always something that’s lost. In parallel with the design of the cover, we tend to believe that communication is never transparent. Even though you might strive, as a design firm, to communicate complex ideas, there’s never a condition in which everyone understands the same idea. In fact, what you’re trying to do is tell a very nuanced story, one that has inflections and one that is actually imperfect.

This cover does have some precedence in our work. In 2013, we designed the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Jesper Just, for a project called “Intercourses.” It was about mistranslation. The whole graphic communication system is about a thing that appears to be a Chinese character, but is actually a made up symbol that doesn’t have any communicative value. That was an important moment for us in thinking how-particularly in a European consciousness—Asia and China still represent the “other.”

WOLKOFF  I’m curious about your notes on the cover on the last page of the Guide, particularly the Katy Perry tweet you included.

WU  Our idea for the back page was to expose the issues and questions we were thinking about with the cover and then make them even more problematic instead of providing solutions. The Katy Perry picture is a perfect example of something lost in translation. Katy Perry went on tour in Asia and performed in Taipei in a costume with sunflowers on it. The sunflower is the symbol of the recent student protest in Taipei about the trading agreement Taiwan has with China. When she came out onstage wearing that everyone thought, “Wow, she’s on our side,” but apparently that’s just the outfit that she’s been wearing for the entire tour. The next city on her tour was Beijing. All of the fans were worried that Katy was going to be banned by the government because she supports Taiwan in protests against China. And nothing happened, the shows went on. The next day she tweeted that she loves China.

Today it was announced that Art in America, along with our sister publications (The Magazine Antiques and Modern) will join forces with ARTNEWS S.A. Peter M. Brant, who has owned Art in America since 1983, will have a controlling interest in the newly formed company.

I look forward to this merger, which will provide new resources and possibilities for Art in America. While there will likely be some changes and enhancements on the digital front, we will retain the distinctive and trustworthy voice found in our printed pages for the past 103 years.

I am grateful to the magazine’s hardworking staff, as well as its dedicated and gifted contributors, for the work they have done and the work we will continue to do in the future. We are also thankful to our advertisers for their support in enabling us to cultivate the next generation of arts writers.

Art in America will continue to publish 11 issues per year, evolving creatively in our pages and beyond. We recently teamed up with the Rauschenberg Foundation to help support arts writing in regions that are often overlooked. We have also begun hosting closed-door conversations with artists, art historians, curators and critics about vital issues in the field. We look forward to leading the conversation in the future and thank our readers for being part of the Art in America family.

Our 2015 Guide to Museums, Galleries and Artists is about to arrive on newsstands and at subscribers’ homes. We are proud of the latest edition, featuring two special covers by the award-winning graphic design firm Project Projects. With over 2,000 listings, the Guide continues to be the most comprehensive printed guidebook to the U.S. art world, listing artists, galleries, museums, art schools, consultants and art services with full contact information.