ART PAPERS

🏙️🤝 This quote, from the second of Fire Ecology’s “distillations,”comes from Burnaway () Editor Courtney McClellan, speaking at the Art Papers Art Writing & Publishing Symposium.

📝🎨With a focus on art writing in the US, we brought together writers, editors, and publishers from across the country to participate in discussions to collectively concretize the field’s direction.

⚗️“Distillations” from this and the other symposium panels can be read in the Fire Ecology issue. Get your copy today via the link in the bio.

The issue is offered free of charge, but the edition is limited.

🧠 🔥🌱 This quote is from an essay, written by Sarah Higgins, that reveals the impetus and ethos for the Fire Ecology project. The project, eponymous with the essay and the final issue, was created out of a desire to highlight that it is unsustainable for things to “continue as normal” for nonprofit arts publications. Higgins maps the changing conditions that pushed Art Papers to fundamentally rethink and restructure how we approach art writing.

🔄 The essay describes how gradually closing Art Papers allowed the organization to facilitate this rethinking. No longer trapped in the precarious cycle of securing next year’s funding from dwindling sources, the organization has been able to take a step back, and bring its community together to reconsider how this important work is done.

📖 Adapted for publication from a talk given by Higgins at the Art Papers Symposium, read the full essay in the Fire Ecology issue, available now via the link in the bio.

🗣️ Fire Ecology includes Be Oakley’s “Failure as Futuremaking,” the last in a long line of Artists’ Pages and Projects in Art Papers over the years. “Failure as Futuremaking” functions as an essay and a demonstration of Oakley’s practice, which includes the making of “Protest Fonts,” typefaces created based on the distinct handmade signage from various protests.

💭 “Failure as Futuremaking” confronts the inadequacy of our conceptions of “success” and “failure,” arguing that we have to recognize the necessity, but also the beauty, in failure to expand possibilities and move toward liberation.

🔤 Oakley’s typeface, inspired by signs from the 2022–2023 RISD Teamsters and New School Adjunct strikes, is used throughout the Fire Ecology issue to title each text, infusing Oakley’s meditations into the core of what the issue articulates.

The issue is offered free of charge, but the edition is limited.

📦 Get your copy today via the link in the bio.

🏛️ In the final issue of Art Papers, Fawz Kabra and Isak Berbić write about their project Brief Histories “as a moving set of entanglements, rather than as an organization or a stable structure.” They were invited to give the closing “Houseguest Talk” at Atlanta Art Ecosystems. Adapted for publication, their talk frames Brief Histories as a case study for creating institutional models that are more fit-to-purpose and based upon a more generative value set.

🧾 This quote is from Brief Histories’ text, which can be read in full in the final issue, Fire Ecology🌱🔥

📗The issue is offered free of charge, but the edition is limited.

🔗 Order your copy now via the link in the bio.

Score a piece of ART PAPERS history at our OFFICE SALE— 📦💝THIS SATURDAY, MAY 16, 11 AM – 4 PM.
Join our staff in bidding farewell to the office that Art Papers has occupied since the 1990s, and go home with a (gently loved) piece of that history. Items will be priced to sell, or make us an offer!
WE HAVE
Filing Cabinets
Tabletops/desks
Office Supplies & Equipment
Catering & Event Supplies
Office Chairs
Glassware
& more!
PLUS
Art Magazines (not just ART PAPERS)
Art Books
Art Papers Merch (T-shirts, Totebags, and, of course magazines!)

💻📐We’re thrilled to announce Jacob Lindgren () as the designer for 50 YEARS of ART PAPERS.

✏️ 🖌️ Lindgren is a Chicago-based graphic designer, web developer, and writer. He has worked on litany of different publications including Peak Picture Pixel Pile co-authored with James Langdon, Mimeograph Chronicles 謄写版クロニクル by Bruno Ruiz Nava and A Non-Coincidental Mirror by Carmen Amengual, all of which are pictured above. Lindgren is also a partner at the design studio Platform () and a co-founder of Inga (), a bookshop focused on self-published and independently distributed artists’ books. His work “with and against the ways knowledge production, politics, and visual language are mediated by storytelling technologies” makes him uniquely attuned to the work of Art Papers, and we are so excited to work with him to share some of the timeless, timely, and ahead-of-their-time texts from our 50-year run.

📚 We’re also extending this second round of pre-order for one more week! If you want to be among the first to receive their copy, make sure to pre-order today via the link in the bio
Have you ordered your copy yet!?

📚 Updated cover reveal! Now that the final issue of ART PAPERS magazine is out in the world, we want to offer a status update on the biggest of our remaining projects, our retrospective book: 50 YEARS of ART PAPERS.

📦 We’ve had to adjust the delivery timeline of the book (thank you for your patience!), but we expect to receive the shipment from our printer in Belgium and begin filling orders in August.

🛍️ In light of this, we’re reopening pre-order through this coming Sunday, May 10. If you missed the initial window, this is another chance to secure your copy at the discounted pre-order price!

🔗 Get your copy today via the link in the bio!

🌱❤️‍🔥Hey LA-area folks! You’re invited celebrate with us at the LA Issue Launch this Friday, May 9, 7–10 PM at Edendale Restaurant & Bar in Silver Lake, CA. Join our Executive + Artistic Director Sarah Higgins, plus past contributors, artists, and friends to celebrate the West Coast launch of the final issue of ART PAPERS, and the conclusion of our 50-year run.

This casual, drop-in evening is a chance to reconnect with the LA-area Art Papers network and to meet some folks whose names you recognize from the masthead. We’ll have copies of the final, Fire Ecology, issue of the magazine, free to take home.

And if you can’t make the party, you can get your copy in our shop. The final issue remains free (link in bio) you will only be responsible for the cost of shipping.
❤️‍🔥🌱

”Oftentimes, what isn’t questioned in the conversation on Pan-Africanism is what’s lost in this panoptic vision of Black experience. How do we maintain the specificity of the local within global solidarity struggles? How do you build a global resistance movement through such a nebulous construct, through a poetic conception that, at its best, instills a shared sense of history but, at its worst, fails to acknowledge the economical, ecological disparities with which we take up liberation struggles on a local scale?” - Re’al Christian

In “The Far-off Elsewhere: Exhibiting Pan-Africanism,” Art Papers contributing editor examines several recent and historical American exhibitions that center Pan-Africanism, and similar conceptions of a wider Black Diaspora, as their subject. Christian methodically assesses how each exhibition demonstrates the strengths and pitfalls of Pan-Africanism as an ethos in service of liberation.

Read the full feature at ARTPAPERS.org.

Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, installation view, Dec 2024–Mar 2025, Reproduction of Haley Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro, 1950-1951,  [courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago] 

Jeff Wall, After Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, the Preface (2002). [photo: Ryszard Kasiewicz; courtesy of documenta, Kassell Germany © documenta Archive]

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics,installation view, Dec 2024 – Aug 2025 [courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art]

🌍”Oftentimes, what isn’t questioned in the conversation on Pan-Africanism is what’s lost in this panoptic vision of Black experience. How do we maintain the specificity of the local within global solidarity struggles? How do you build a global resistance movement through such a nebulous construct, through a poetic conception that, at its best, instills a shared sense of history but, at its worst, fails to acknowledge the economical, ecological disparities with which we take up liberation struggles on a local scale?” - Re’al Christian

In “The Far-off Elsewhere: Exhibiting Pan-Africanism,” Christian examines several recent American exhibitions that took Pan-Africanism, and similar conceptions of a wider Black Diaspora, as their subject. Christian methodically assesses how each exhibition demonstrates the strengths and pitfalls of Pan-Africanism as an ethos in service of liberation. —Read the full review at ARTPAPERS.org.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, installation view, Dec 2024–Mar 2025, Reproduction of Haley Woodruff’s, The Art of the Negro, 1950-1951, [photo: Sarah Higgins; courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago]