In March 2021 The Brooklyn Rail invited me to serve as its guest critic, as which I commissioned a special section on art manifestos. Its aim was to get at the heart of what it means to declare a new world by interrogating a messy genre full of grand ambitions and lofty idealism, claims toward aesthetic purity and a complicated interplay of art, language and politics.
The section’s contributors included Sarah Cowan, Emmanuel Iduma, Kaitlyn A. Kramer, Pac Pobric, José Peña-Loyola, Amelia Rina, Noah Dillon and Christopher Alessandrini—several of whom also participated in a panel discussion as part of the paper’s New Social Environment series. Julia Schäfer designed the print edition, excerpted below, which riffs on the visual language of manifestos.
