A Dead Rooster On The Cover

A feature story in volume 17 on the performance art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, which prominently featured a deceased chicken, led to a memorable moment of copier art in which Editor Glenn Harper and Designer Elizabeth Lide collectively balanced a dead rooster on the glass plate of a photocopier, producing one of the more startling Art Papers covers (see photo) of the first half of the 1990s. More unexceptionably, a work by the European architecture collective Coop Himmelblau graced the next cover, and a feature on Lonnie Holley marked a continuing concern with Southern folk art. Other issues that year included a symposium on “The Spectacle of Culture in Museums” that featured Fred Wilson at the height of his “Mining the Museum” fame in conversation with anthropologist Ivan Karp. “The Antemillennium Dollhouse” was a competition sponsored by the magazine that provoked the imaginations of architectural students to the design of dollhouses that addressed major issues of dwelling or housing.