The Cultural Olympiad

A full range of mainstream and marginal visual arts and performance accompanied the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, and the magazine offered extensive coverage throughout volume 20 of everything from Siah Armajani’s tower and cauldron to the Taboo collective’s sendup of the hoopla surrounding Southern identity. An issue featuring international and Southern artists’ pages was on the streets for the Games themselves. Issues before and after explored topics from “City Limits,” a return to topics of architectural and social space, to the “Artist’s Survival Guide,” an issue dealing with practical questions that was so popular with working artists that it became the basis for a column that continues to the present day under the title “Surviving.” “Re-defining the Nineties” included interviews with Hal Foster and Thomas McEvilley on the elusive topic of how the decade was shaping up just past mid-point. Three of the year’s six issues were edited by individual staff members Cathy Downey, Jerry Cullum, and Amy Jinkner-Lloyd after the departure of Glenn Harper, who left the magazine to become Editor of the Washington-based publication, Sculpture.