A New Editor, and New Topics
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2002 saw the arrival of the first Editor of Canadian nationality, Charles Reeve. The year began with an exploration of diverse topics that would recur later in various guises, from graphic novels to robotic performance in the Venice Biennale to the displacement of humanism and the rise of a new spirituality. The obituary of globally famed Georgia vernacular artist Howard Finster marked a symbolic point of transition, while a studio visit with Atlanta Afrofuturist Kevin Sipp marked another harbinger of things to come (long afterward). The following issue brought a conversation with curator Robert Hobbs regarding Kara Walker’s work at the São Paulo Biennale, L. Kristin Herndon’s perspective on the state of digital art, Gean Moreno on the meeting of contemporary art and car customizing, and Amy Landesberg and Leslie Fitzpatrick’s artists’ pages using and subverting cosmetics and false eyelashes. An essay on art in Mexico and a studio visit with Glexis Novoa rounded out the issue, continuing the custom of arranging studio visits relevant to major themes in the issue. Over the course of the year, essays contrasting the “shopping mall colonialism” of a New York survey show on Brazilian art with the nuanced perspective of a contemporaneous exhibition of artists from India and Pakistan, an interview with Okwui Enwezor on contemporary African art, and essays on white South African artist Kendall Geers, Brazilian conceptual artist Maria Tavares, and the vexed concept of “post-black” art demonstrated a set of overlapping concerns, alongside one-offs on Bruce Mau’s design philosophy, post-graffiti, the materiality of painting, apocalypse as a simplistic notion, and discontent in arts criticism in the American Midwest.