World First, Museum Second: Announcing a Brand-New Open Space

This is enchanting: SFMOMA's already well-lit and educational (and poet-friendly) Open Space has a new website! Editor Suzanne Stein reflects on the three years of thinking, planning, and building that she, Open Space managing editor Gordon Faylor, and many others have put into the new site:

Our columnists-in-residence program — in which our regular writers are free to write and publish without editorial oversight from Open Space or SFMOMA — continues to be a unique publishing experiment within the field of museum institutions; indeed, it is rare in any case. Two of us are employed full-time by SFMOMA to steward the magazine, yet the platform is also held in common by the ever-growing collective of columnists who retain the keys to Open Space and can post in at any time.

Open Space also occupies a peculiar threshold in the universe of arts journalism. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is our home and bankroll, but especially our launching pad — our gaze is trained on the world first, museum second. We think with our contributors and audience about art and its issues, we generate new experiments in writing about art, and we invite original media that responds to art. In residence as we are at a value-conferring institution, Open Space strives to avoid the qualifying, evaluative space and instead aims to work within the more fluid spaces of inquiry, response, and overt subjectivity.

Over the years, our columnists have leveraged Open Space into a place for critical conversations that often had no other public venue. The examples are many, from an impassioned discussion about the impending closure of thirty-year-old alternative art space New Langton Arts in 2009, touched off by one of our first columnists, Julian Myers, to a debate last spring around the potential costs vs. rewards of artists’ participation in the stARTup Art Fair, sparked by a post collaboratively authored by columnist alum Joseph del Pesco and his guest, Bean Gilsdorf.

We are proud to have been able to host these and many other conversations, and proud that for nearly eight years we’ve been able to keep the platform open to tough new engagements, even when they were aimed directly at SFMOMA practices or programs. (See, for example, our Shop Talk series, examining the implications of artist Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadow Shop installation, or Anne Walsh’s assessment of the race and gender balance in SFMOMA collections exhibitions.)

The climate for the arts in our region has changed rapidly and radically since 2008 and the early days of Open Space — among other things, the tech boom has meant aggressively escalating rents and cost of living, which in turn means artists and art spaces are faced with an aggressive new precarity.

"Open Space solicits and supports critical and experimental responses to art, institutions, and culture." Enjoy the fruits of much labor here; and check out the full list of contributors, ranging from artist and performer Shana Moulton to writer Rebecca Solnit, here.

At top: film still from Al Wong’s Twin Peaks (1977), from "Sunlight and Shadows: Al Wong in Conversation."