Every year in late summer, Juxtapoz heads to Stavanger, Norway for the world’s leading street art gathering, Nuart Festival. And even though it’s a collection of artists, academics and journalists who work in and amongst urban art, each year brings new perspectives on contemporary art and how this era is covered in our magazine. A group of us who have been going for years, as well as new contributors to the festival, feel like an extended family. We discuss many topics that Juxtapoz considers year round: how social media impacts our engagement in art, how to make art more accessible to a wider audience and how to best articulate the ever-changing historical context of a massive audience that appreciates this work while knocking on the doors of the institutional world to give this burgeoning culture the recognition it deserves.
We leave Norway each year with new energy and revitalized vision, intent on better engagement with our audience, both in print and the digital worlds. This year, we came home with a fresh idea: let’s go back to our roots in order to better serve our future and our readers. Starting with our winter, 2018 issue, Juxtapoz will go back to its original format as a quarterly publication, with more intensive and extensive presence on the web and social media platforms, as well as our continued forays into site-specific projects and curated ventures. Basically, we are going to be doing a lot more coverage of our art world, while at the same time, creating a beautiful archival print product with even more attention to detail and speciality. Yes, that means a larger physical format, superior paper stock, and more pages to better exhibit the topics and personalities we cover. But, most importantly, it means surpassing everything we already do at Juxtapoz. There are so many great announcements we are going to make over the next few months, and the Juxtapoz Quarterly is just the start.
We make this announcement even as we accelerate momentum in this November 2017 issue. One of the critical changes we have noticed over the past 10 years or so has been our ability to merge what we see in the institutional world with what is happening in the studios of emerging artists around the world. From cover artist Toyin Ojih Odutola entering the hallowed halls of the Whitney Museum with a museum retrospective at the age of 32 (!), to Matthew Palladino’s playful enamel plaster works, or Adam Neate’s Dimensionalism works that combine street work and fine art, this issue is about exploring the most exciting and influential artists of contemporary culture. Whether in the Jux Quarterly, the newly revamped website, and more pop-up productions in the years to come, we continue our mission to best present the art world to you, our readers. We are more excited than ever, and we can’t wait to bring you along with us.
Enjoy Issue #202, November 2017, and enjoy the next wave. —Evan Pricco
Subscribe to the new Juxtapoz Quarterly here! The Winter 2018 print issue will hit newsstands on December 5, 2017, and will be specially released at our Juxtapoz events during Miami Basel week, December 7—10, 2017.
