ART PAPERS

🧠 🔥🌱 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.

💻📐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]