End of Year Letter: 2024 -> 2025

This time last year, Art Papers teetered on the edge of a cliff. We were scrambling to keep this legacy organization from tipping over and falling to a sudden end—the kind of end that is met by too many long-running and historically significant institutions. To put it bluntly, we weren’t sure if Art Papers would make it to the end of 2023. At that point of crisis, we decided to do something radical, something that ran against the conventional wisdom for nonprofits.

We opted to embrace the metaphor of Fire Ecology—the practice of using controlled fires to maintain ecosystem health by burning old growth to fertilize the soil. We adopted a three-year strategic plan that mobilizes our knowledge, resources, and historic role within our intersecting communities. We planned to enact the ethos of fire ecology by embracing radical transparency, and by thematizing our challenges to convene a multipart discursive project to diagnose, synthesize, speculate, and report upon the current health of the arts nonprofit and art writing/publishing fields. Our hope was to make our ending into a process of fertilization for new beginnings.

But this plan was just that—a plan. We did not, at that time, have the resources to realize it, only the hope that it would inspire others to support us in the endeavor. It was an experiment. A Hail Mary. A gambit.

In 2024, we received outstanding support to realize the Fire Ecology plan. We received local grant support from AEC Trust, Georgia Council for the Arts, Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and major funding support from national foundations such as the Wagner Foundation, Tieger Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Each of these foundations saw value in our vision to give Art Papers a dignified ending—one that would prove generative to the communities we serve.

In January 2024, we staged an international art auction in partnership with Artsy, and on November 20 we hosted IGNITE: A Curated Art Papers Auction. Both events presented a carefully selected offering of artworks chosen by a renowned group of curators.

Through the combined support of these grants, fundraising events, and the generosity of individual donors, we can safely say that we have the resources to realize the Fire Ecology plan:

• Atlanta Art Ecosystems—A two-day series of public programs focused on the Atlanta visual art community’s resilience, adaptability, and sustainability March 1–2, 2025, at Atlanta Contemporary
• ART PAPERS Symposium—A three-day national convening to explore and assess the current state of art writing and publishing to coincide with Atlanta Art Week and Atlanta Art Fair in 2025
• Fire Ecology— the final issue of ART PAPERS magazine will compile highlights from the Atlanta Ecosystems and Symposium projects alongside reporting that covers where—and how—artists and arts organizations are finding sustainability and forging new paths for survival
• 50 Years of Art Papers Book—a retrospective selection of ART PAPERS’ contribution to contemporary art discourse, with spotlights on past editors and history-making texts
• Securing our legacy, and sunsetting the organization—completing our institutional papers, which are held by Emory University; placing complete sets of ART PAPERS magazine in collections, libraries, and museums; and disbursing our assets within the Atlanta art community

We’ll be able to celebrate Art Papers’ legacy by mustering our archive, network, experience, and knowledge to produce this robust series of programs and bring Art Papers to a meaningful, controlled conclusion of operations in 2026, after 50 years.

We’ve already begun. In 2024 we:

• shifted our publishing to ARTPAPERS.org exclusively, and continued publishing innovative, ideas-driven art writing. Alongside our current thematic exploration of Documentary After Truth, we produced Reworlding, guest-edited by artist Michael Jones McKean, to explore the theme of planetary thinking. In summer, we launched Interpreting Site, guest-edited by the inaugural Mildred Thompson Arts Writing & Editorial Fellow, Sherae Rimpsey, as the culmination of a two-year fellowship in collaboration with the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University.
• hosted 4 Contributor Conversations on Instagram Live.
• convened a steering committee of local arts leaders to meet monthly and collaborate to plan the Atlanta Art Ecosystems program.
• launched ECHOES, a podcast that will mine our archive of past conversations and offer a platform to share new conversations in the coming year.
• continued the work of activating Art Papers’ rich archive of historic art writing, interviews, and artist projects with the addition of an Atlanta button on our home page to make it easy to find our hometown coverage; a collection of artist and writer Christian Walker’s historic contributions to the magazine; archival interviews with Judy Pfaff, Richard Misrach, Nicole Eisenman, and Jonathan Lasker; a spotlight on ART PAPERS’ 1991 special issue on the Alternative Arts Press, and more.
• were a cultural partner in the inaugural Atlanta Art Fair, where we presented a booth spotlighting rare and hard-to-find issues from our magazine archive, print editions by artists featured in ART PAPERS, and one-of-a-kind T-Shirts. We also partnered with the fair’s talks program to present ALT ATL: Artist-Run Spaces and Experimental Projects.

A radical new plan calls for new leadership. In 2024:

• Sarah Higgins stepped into the newly formed role of Executive + Artistic Director
• Amy Miller took the new development role of Director of Institutional Advancement
• Noah Reyes was promoted to the role of Program + Outreach Coordinator
• Jaedon Mason joined the team as Advertising + Communications Coordinator
• We welcomed a robust new cohort to our Board of Directors: Louise Shaw, Donovan Johnson, Elliot McNally, Chris Wolf, Jill Frank, Tommy T. Thomas, and Art Papers Co-Founder Dan R. Talley joined the Art Papers Board
• We were joined by a stellar group of interns: Natalie Arrue, Brayan Enriquez, Montenez Lowery, Lucy Luckovich, Jaedon Mason, Giovanna Querido, and Mitali Singh

In just the first few months of 2025, we will:

• kick things off with a party to launch pre-orders for the 50 Years of Art Papers book at Lucian Books & Wine. (Jan 26: details + tickets coming soon!)
• present Atlanta Art Ecosystems public talks series March 1–2 at Atlanta Contemporary
• continue publishing new content on ARTPAPERS.org, including our spring issue exploring the theme of Land Liberation, guest edited by Joey Orr, and more
• launch a partnership with Oxford American to spotlight Atlanta-based artists
• continue our Contributor Conversations series and produce new episodes of our podcast, ECHOES.

Later in 2025 we’ll bring back the long-lost Art Papers T-Shirt Party, host our national symposium on art writing and publishing, continue publishing new and archival content on ARTPAPERS.org—and we have a few surprises in store, too.

The best way to keep track of all our programs, news, and the latest essays, interviews, reviews, and more is to sign up for our weekly newsletter and follow us on Instagram @artpapers. We don’t want you to miss anything.