email 3 – looking back

hi there,

this is a little late because of the holidays, travel, omicron, whatever. but i say the new year starts whenever you want/need it to! here is an end of 2021/start of 2022 art email for you.

i always enjoy "year in review" type articles, it makes me feel like i was part of something (or totally out of the loop if i don't remember anything on the list!). here's a good one from my old pal the new yorker:

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</div> </a><p>these kinds of articles are a sort of archive specific to the last year in art-world happenings, and i want to keep the archive theme going with looks back to slightly-less-recent years in art. here are some archives or histories that aren't recent enough to be current, but not old enough to be historical.</p>

i found out about chicago artist writers pretty much right at the end of their project. it was an effort to increase the output of critical arts writing in the city, and to include artists in that endeavor. writing helps contextualize artwork and offer point of entry and connection... this whole newsletter is an appreciation of arts writing for doing exactly that! this article explains what CAW was up to and why it mattered.

this here is a link to a PDF of the first installment of a project started by writer paddy johnson, called "impractical spaces," which documents defunct artist-run spaces across the country. at least i hope it still does! does anyone know if this is still going on? i loved the idea and feel like an archive of these spaces would be so valuable to the arts, because so many small DIY style projects don't get proper documentation before they close, and are essentially lost to history. this edition was specific to the D.C. area.

this is an example of a super analog project that is documented so incredibly well! queer.archive.work makes zines and whatnot and has lots of them available as high-quality pdfs. i am linking to a dropbox with their first publication from 2018, which was released unbound, and which you can recreate by printing at home. if you do, make sure to consider donating to their organization.

another piece of analog arts writing that we are fortunate to have documentation of is "the organ," which was a broadsheet-style art newspaper published in portland, oregon in the 2000s. the image link above will take you to issue 1, from 2002, this link to the oregon arts ecology project will lead you to more...

lastly, a short interview with the director of contemporary art library about the practice of archiving itself. i would have loved to have a resource like this when i was growing up in rural vermont totally clueless about contemporary art. thank you to people like forrest nash who are working to make art accessible to wider audiences! seriously, instagram just isn't gonna cut it.

ok that's all for now! thank you for reading, and please share your reading suggestions with me if you have any : )

martha