February 02, 2010

Remembering ArtWeek


For an upcoming project I’ve been researching the first issues of art magazines produced in the San Francisco Bay Area. The SF Bay Area hasn’t been able to sustain a contemporary arts journal for a variety of reasons, but there have been at least a dozen attempts. With the help of my brave and talented intern Simon Jolly, I’ll be scanning and presenting a number of these journals in June in conjunction with the SFAC Gallery’s 40th Anniversary. We’ll also be running OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software on all the scans which makes the downloadable pdfs word-searchable, a helpful aid to research. I’m starting with ArtWeek, which has been on my mind since it ceased printing last year. While it’s never been a specifically San Francisco oriented magazine, and hasn’t been a progressively contemporary journal in well over a decade, many notable writers and curators from the Bay Area have contributed to its four decades in print.

Download Page for ArtWeek Vol. 1 No. 1

Comments (22)

  • I am looking for artweek issues, please get in touch if you have many “lwdomain (a ) gmail dot com ” Thanks

  • Barry S. Hogrefe says:

    I’m going thru all of my graduate art school stuff, and found a foot-high stack of ARTWEEK newspapers from the EARLY 70’s! Anyone want them for free?
    hogreb@yahoo.com

  • Matthew Simms says:

    Message for Cliff Cotterill.

    I am the west coast collector for the Archives of American Art. Please let me know if you would like to donate your back issues of Artweek to us. We have a full run of LAICA magazines, as well as others. Artweek would be crucial for west coast representation in the national context.

    Matthew Simms

  • I have a collection of Artweek Magazine back issues from the early 1970’s (when I was assistant editor). If anyone here is interested let me know. I can’t seem to access the Joseph del Pesco’s project site to see if they have already been archived.

  • Debra Whipple says:

    I’m volunteering as an art docent with LACMA in the public schools. I have sa Studio Art degree and Art History minor from UC Irvine. I took and Art History class from the editor of ArtWeek for 2 consecutive years from the editor of ArtWeek in 1977-1979. I don’t remember his name. Does anyone know who he was? I’d like to go back and read his editorials so I give students the full experience of how Artists were influenced as he gave to me.

  • Hello,

    I am looking for Artweek articles written by Fred Martin (I am an artist and a researcher on contemporary artists as shamans). If anyone can tell me how to find old issues, please let me know.

    Thanks,

    Denita Benyshek, PhD/MA Psychology, MFA/BFA art.

  • Hi Joseph, is this a project that continued? I’m looking for issues of Artweek from the 1970s and they’re hard to come by!

  • Thank you for this. It was great finding this issue. I couldn’t even find it at the National Gallery of Art.

    –Rocky

  • Joseph del Pesco says:

    I’ve just updated the link, the old project site domain expired. You can also view all the first (SF) issues scanned as part of the project here: http://collectivefoundation.org/circulationdesk/

  • P.S. Sorry for the mangled HTML in my above comment.

    The Post here has a link above that says “Go to Download Page for ArtWeek Vol. 1 No. 1” which does not work. I’m just hoping the PDF exists somewhere else on this site or elsewhere. Anyone have an idea on this.

    Ron

  • Cecile McCann, in the early years of ARTWEEK, would publish and promote what mainstream art mags (and local newspapers) wouldn’t touch or avoided. While typically advertising future shows and reviewing past shows, she was also part of the action in many ways, supportive of artist-driven events and new ideas in the early 70s when it was needed. For mail artists and conceptual/performance oriented artists, ARTWEEK was like a statewide town crier, getting word out about events and projects that might not have been noticed until well after the action. California artists of my era especially owe Cecile a periodic posthumous note of gratitude, even while knowing that she sometimes was supporting stuff about which few people outside the underground understood or even knew existed. ARTWEEK was, in fact, a very early art zine, a forerunner of artist-driven publications.

  • Hi Joseph,

    So glad you’re doing this. I was closely associated with Uta Nietiet who I notice is tagged here, as well as a few others who may show up in your research. There has been so little on line for this subject and the artists. Your work will be greatly appreciated by me and many others.

    I clicked the link above for the PDF for Art Week Vol. 1 No. 1 and it is apparently no longer available. Is there a chance it is now at another address?

    Thanks,
    Ron

  • Andrea Joki says:

    I am doing research on Los Angeles artist, Robert Marks, and I am looking for critical reviews of his work in Artweek from May 1971. Have the May 1971 issues been scanned and available on-line?

  • Chris, I don’t think it was me! But I will join the search…

  • This book doesn’t fit your description but it’s a good resource on 1970s performance art in the Bay Area and is now Google Books searchable:

    Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance. Edited by Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong. San Francisco, CA: Contemporary Arts Press, 1980.

  • Chris Cobb says:

    Another obscure but amazing document of the times (late 1960’s up through 1979) is a book on performance art in the San Francisco bay area printed in 1980. I loaned it out to someone several years ago (Meredith Tromble maybe/maybe not???) and have never seen another copy. The cover was a photograph of Terry Fox doing his “Corner Piece.” As I recall. it was quite an interesting a bit of scholarship and art history. Wish I knew what it was called.

  • Christopher Howard says:

    I’m doing research on Dennis Oppenheim, and I’m unable to locate copies of Artweek from the early 1970s anywhere in a New York library, where I live. By any chance, do you have these issues and pages scanned? If so, could you somehow post or send them?

    “Body Works at MOCA,” Artweek 1, no. 34 (October 10, 1970): 2.
    Cecile N. McCann, “Dennis Oppenheim: Conceptualist,” Artweek, November 21, 1970, 2.

    Thanks!

  • Joseph del Pesco says:

    Thanks Stephanie, T, and Terri, I’ve already collected and scanned first-issues of 14 different magazines for the project! I’ll be making them available at the end of May via the SFAC Gallery exhibition. All the best, JdP

  • I’m glad to see what you’re doing with this project, and find the idea of optical scanning of text an exciting possibility. Although Artweek was not focused solely on San Francisco, the Bay Area was the focal point for much of the magazine’s history, and without access to those archives, much of the rich artistic history of this area will remain hidden. Thanks!

  • A belated thanks for doing this! It’ll be an invaluable resource. Would love to see all of the issues of La Mamelle Magazine: Art Contemporary make their way online someday…

  • Stephanie Syjuco says:

    I love your idea of optically scanning the text for future searches… What a great way to keep the archived info flowing and circulating!

See all responses (22)
Leave a comment

Please tell us what you think. We really love conversation, and we’re happy to entertain dissenting opinions. Just no name-calling, personal attacks, slurs, threats, spam, and the like, please. Those ones we reserve the right to remove.
Required

Sign Up

Join our newsletter for infrequent updates on new posts and Open Space events.
  • Required, will not be published

Dear Visitor,
We regret to inform you that Open Space is no longer active. It was retired at the end of 2021. We sincerely appreciate your support and engagement over the years.

For your reference, we encourage you to read past entries or search the site.

To stay informed about future ventures or updates, please follow us at
https:://sfmoma.org.

Thank you for being a part of our journey!