A lot of readers, I would guess, may snort, “Oh, sure”—but the remark rings true to my sense of Edit’s character. Across nineteen issues the editors created a space for criticism that was heady and smart, offbeat and irreverent, publishing an energetic mix of artist interviews, statements, exhibition reviews, “loft reviews”, and photo editorials that transcended the interests of typical art journals.

Mike [Robinson] was multitalented: He had eloquence, brilliant descriptive gifts, he was a fine critic, and he was going to be a really fine artist. Published simultaneously in two editions, one with black cover text and one with red, containing substantial interior differences. dated summer 1974, Dorothea Rockburne had the staff (deAk, Robinson, and Cohn, that is) fold the bottom right-hand corner of every cover upward on a diagonal to divide a large, delicately outlined, but otherwise blank square into a pair of triangles. I think deAk’s use of the word relates in part to Artforum, funnily enough, and to its role in the world in which the Art-Rite editors were growing up. The magazine was famous for its covers, which were always by artists, William Wegman contributing an oh-so-smart and funny drawing for no.Drawn from the archives of editor Edit DeAk, the show traces the early history of Art-Rite through an array of original production materials, much on display here for the first time. We had really simple ideas about assisting artists, looking forward, new things, speaking directly without jargon . A near complete run, of this important art magazine, lacking only the final issue (21), issue 16 was never published. Perfectly positioned between the underground and the establishment, the magazine featured artists who became defining voices of the era, including Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, and Gordon Matta-Clark.

Art in America, which was founded in 1913 and had since become one of the nation’s most prestigious contemporary art magazines, had been helmed by Jean Lipman from 1940 to 1971 and would hire Elizabeth C. Meanwhile, artist-focused issues gave over the entire space to the work of individuals or collectives such as Demi, Image Bank, Kim MacConnel, Rosemary Mayer, Judy Rifka, Alan Vega (of the band Suicide), and the Vancouver-based group Western Front. The application goes on to describe the magazine’s “close relationship with the art community” and its reflection of “the younger generation’s view.in December 1978: a group of several thousand unique drawings by Rifka, on paper printed on one side with the Art-Rite logo and folded once over the drawing on the other side. Given the established links between the banking system and the art market, Art-Rite promotes collaboration with financial institutions and operators as well as the investment in art as an asset class. EDIT DEAK AND WALTER ROBINSON may shudder to hear it, but talking to them recently about Art-Rite I accidentally thought of that old movie in which Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, teenaged and rural, stage a Broadway-type musical in a barn: “Hey kids, let’s put on a show! By the end of the 1960s, modern art had reached its apotheosis with the advent Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks. Art-Rite’s five-year run was marked by ambitious thematic issues (on Painting, Video, Performance, and Artists’ Books) and single-artist focus issues, charting the richness of de-materialized and alternative art practices, including publications themselves, that emerged out of conceptualism and post-minimalism.