Georgia Historic Newspapers

Art Papers is an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization with an educational mission to provide accessible forums for documenting, examining, commissioning, and presenting contemporary art and culture through publishing and live programs.

Art Papers, originally the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Newsletter, was established in 1976 to create a physical space for programs and an intellectual space for publishing and dialogue between artists working in the Southern US and those working outside the South. In 1977, they printed their first newsletter (the AAWC Newsletter). The first issue of the AAWC Newsletter, published in February 1977, was a single-page, hand-typed flyer containing several classified ads for items such as studio space, exhibition listings and opportunities. The second issue was similar but contained a photocopied reprint of an article from the Medical Tribune on lead and toxemia risks for artists. By mid-1977, AAWC received long-awaited grant funding for two staff positions: the NEA-funded Director of Activities, to which Julia Fenton was appointed, and a curatorial position funded by CETA, for which Dan Talley was hired.

In 1978, the publication shifted from newsletter to newspaper by establishing a bimonthly, tabloid-size format that the publication would maintain for the next 24 years. To gain greater editorial autonomy, founding editors ended the relationship with Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Newspaper with the March/April 1980 issue and became the independent non-profit organization Atlanta Art Papers Inc. The “new” publication, Atlanta Art Papers, was born.

Founded by artists Tommy Mew and Ken Friedman, and the first in the South of its type, Contemporary Art/Southeast began development in 1975 under a non-profit corporation headed by Heath Gallery owner David Heath and librarian and artist Julie Fenton. Eleven issues were published between 1977 and 1980. In 1980, Atlanta Art Papers, Inc. and this regional Atlanta-based arts journal merged to become simply, ART PAPERS, with the subtitle “Covering the Arts in the Southeast.”

By 1991, ART PAPERS was a national art journal of prominence routinely featuring well-known artists and writers alongside emerging ones, an editorial practice that continued throughout the organization's lifetime. By the early 2000s, the publication had established an international reputation and became renowned in Atlanta for its annual art auction. In 2017, ART PAPERS magazine went quarterly, and the publication relaunched a new, dynamic website that provided an expanded platform for publishing new and archival content.

In 2024, Art Papers launched Fire Ecology, a three-year strategic plan created in response to insurmountable funding challenges and designed to celebrate the publication’s legacy, mobilize the organization’s resources in service to their local and national communities, and arrive at meaningful conclusion of operations in 2026, at 50 years. Fire Ecology includes multiple public programs designed to examine post-COVID realities of arts nonprofits in the southeast—with community-led roundtables and public talks and a symposium on the national role of, and challenges facing, arts publishing and writing today—and to publish the outcomes of these programs in a final issue of the magazine, with the intention to fertilize the ground from which new arts platforms and practices will emerge.

Provided by: Digital Library of Georgia