Research Guides: Artists' Writings and Interviews: Journals & Magazines

Journals

Browsing

NYU subscribes to a number of journals on contemporary art that regularly publish conversations with artists. Examples of titles to browse are listed below.

Journals with a long history of publishing artist interviews will occasionally make a series of them available in book form as an anthology. See the Books tab as well as the Search Strategies section of this guide for more on anthologies and how to find them.

Searching

See the Art and Art History: Articles and Databases guide to learn more about available databases that index art journals.

News Sites

For even more frequent coverage of artist interviews as well as writings, check these news sites. Physical copies of Art Newspaper (library catalog record) and Brooklyn Rail (library catalog record) with additional content are also available to browse.

Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail
Publication Date: 2017
Since 2000, The Brooklyn Rail has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. Cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the Rail's contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for The Brooklyn Rail. This volume brings together a selection of sixty interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha.

Artists' Magazines

Artists' magazines or little magazines are serials that serve as venues for art and expression on artists' own terms. They can be rich sources of artist interviews and works written by artists. Though the most well known examples are short-lived publications from the 1960-1980s, artists continue to produce these magazines today.

The magazines listed here are available at NYU, or are freely available online. See the Fales Avant Garde collection and Downtown collection for more examples of artists' magazines and similar primary sources.

Art-Rite
Cheaply produced on newsprint, this magazine from the 1970s published hundreds of interviews, exhibition and performance reviews, statements, and projects by, with, and about a generation of artists. Art-Rite included both single-artist issues and thematic issues on performance, video, and artists' books.

Art-Rite (facsimile edition)
Publication Date: 2019
This facsimile edition collects all 19 issues of 'Art-Rite' magazine, edited by art critics Walter Robinson and Edit DeAk from 1973 to 1978.

Aspen
This artists' magazine ran from 1965-1971. Aspen consisted of boxes or folders filled with multimedia content, including phonographs, Super-8 films, printed booklets, flyers, posters, and other ephemera. Each issue had a different editor and designer, and was devoted to a different topic, such as Pop art or Asian art and philosophy.
Audio Arts Magazine
Audio Arts was a cassette based magazine, which sought to document contemporary artistic activity by recording artists' voices. It was established by William Furlong and Barry Barker in 1973, and was published for 35 years. The magazine was digitized by the Tate, and is freely available online.
Avalanche
Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar founded and edited Avalanche, which ran from 1970-1976. The magazine focused on art from the perspective of artists rather than critics, and investigated new forms of art that were developing in the U.S. and Europe with interviews, extensive use of photography and dynamic layouts. For many artists, publication in Avalanche preceded a one-person gallery or museum show. Aside from an eight-page news section, the editorial content included only interviews, artists' texts and documents of art and art making.

See the Avalanche Magazine Index to find specific interviews and features within.

Avalanche (facsimile edition)
Publication Date: 2010
This boxed facsimile edition of Avalanche's complete run reproduces the first eight issues individually, and the final five in a single newsprint paperback.

BOMB Magazine
BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. Archives of this content are available online. See also their Oral History Project, which is dedicated to collecting, developing, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora.
Esopus
A publication founded in 2003 that aims to provide a forum through which artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people can make a direct connection with the general public. Audio and video content, as well as artwork, is often included.
Gagarin: the Artists in their Own Words
This Belgian journal, published from 2000-2016, is entirely comprised of texts by international contemporary artists. The essays, poems, and textual experiments are in various languages, with English translations provided. Much of the content has not been published elsewhere. An index of then recently published artists' writings is included in each issue.

Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art by Gwen Allen
Publication Date: 2011
In this book, Gwen Allen provides an introduction to artists' magazines, examines them in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s), and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of examples.