When Andrew Johnson decided he wanted to create an arts publication at the end of his two-year studio residency for writers at the Charlotte Street Foundation, he mentioned his plan to Courtney Wasson, executive director of Kansas City Artists Coalition.
Frequent conversations with other artists had led Johnson to believe there was a need for more writing about Kansas City’s creative community.
“So many other artists said there was a hunger for more documentation of what's happening in the arts community,” Johnson said.
Instead of starting from scratch, Wasson suggested Johnson should resurrect Forum, a defunct Artists Coalition magazine that ran from 1975 until 2001. For more than two decades, the volunteer-run magazine explored the area’s arts scene.
The return of Forum was celebrated earlier this month at a launch party held at Fire House KC event space, on Troost Avenue, with Johnson presiding as the new editor.
The rebooted print magazine, produced every two months, promises critical art reviews, photographic and personal essays, poetry, artist profiles and interviews. Johnson aims to elevate the conversation about local arts.
"I’m really excited that we are doing this again,” Wasson said to the crowd of artists gathered at the magazine’s relaunch. “I hope that, with the rebirth of Forum, that we put forth discourse of thought and celebrate what's happening here in our community.”
To bring the publication back, Wasson and Johnson sifted through boxes of past issues to study the magazine’s history. Digging through the archives helped inform the format of the revamped periodical.
Thumbing through the old pages, Johnson discovered many issues that were urgent for artists then are still urgent today. He hopes the new magazine will help artists build community and find artist-led solutions for these recurring challenges.
“The conversation that was happening then is very reflective of conversations that still happen now,” he said, “around cost of living, around community, around studio space, around public funding for arts, and what resources are out there to support artists.”
Among the crowd of artists and well-wishers was former Forum editor William Kay, who got involved after studying photography at the Kansas City Art Institute and becoming friends with Artists Coalition founders Lou Marak and Philomene Bennett.
“Going to the Kansas City Art Institute at that time, we loved the arts but, after you graduated, finding a job was a difficult thing,” Kay said.
For artists, building a career in the Midwest has always been a challenge, and the rise in cost of living and lack of affordable studio space has always been a complaint.
“Artists have to understand business to survive and prosper,” he said. “You don't want to be a struggling artist if you don't have to be.”
Johnson said he hopes the new publication will encourage a broad audience of people to get out to see art, buy art and practice art themselves. He also wants to create a space for honest critique of the work being created.
“Pushing through some of our ‘Midwest nice,’” Johnson called it, “to challenge ourselves on what not only works and is good in some pieces of art, but also what maybe is not working.”
“It's not just regurgitated press releases, not just fluff pieces, but really bringing good thinking about art into the pages,” he said.
In the inaugural issue, writer David Alpert reviewed Kansas City’s One Percent for Art program’s selections at the Kansas City International Airport, addressing each of the nine works by national artists that soaked up 93% of the new terminal’s art budget.
Alpert did not hold back: “We don’t have to squander it (the budget) on unoriginal lobby art or on art that reduces us to a few outdated clichés,”
Next to copies of the new, 16-page issue piled on tables at the relaunch event sat the entire archive of the old Forum magazine, bound together in three-ring binders.
Walter Brayman, who was a part of the team that worked on the magazine in the mid-1970s, said looking through the collection brought back many memories.
Back in the day, he said, the magazine served a real need in the local arts community, and he was sad when it folded.
“What we wanted to do was explain what artists were doing here,” Brayman said, examining an early issue featuring Christo’s 1978 “Wrapped Walk Ways” installation in Jacob Loose Memorial Park. The international event featured 135,000 square feet of saffron-colored nylon fabric covering almost three miles of formal garden walkways and jogging paths.
“It was really, really fun and no one got paid, so it was all basically volunteer work,” he said.
Members of the Kansas City Artists Coalition will receive the magazine by mail as a perk of membership, and the publication will be available in galleries, bookstores and coffee shops for $2 – the very same price per issue when the magazine started back in the 1970s.
At the launch party, Johnson said responding to the work of local artists in the pages of the new magazine is a conversation well worth having.
“Whichever field you see yourself in as an artist,” Johnson said, “it's a conversation that I think is incredibly enriching.”
