in December 1978: a group of several thousand unique drawings by Rifka, on paper printed on one side with the Art-Rite logo and folded once over the drawing on the other side. A use of the word “humble” seems a long-term habit: “We were really thinking very humbly,” she told me, and back in 1974 she told Alan Moore, who was writing an ultimately unpublished article on Art-Rite for Artforum (Edit has a copy of the hot-type-set galleys), that she saw herself as the “humble servant” of artists. Complete run of all issues published of Art-Rite, periodical edited by Edit DeAk and Walter Robinson. A few years later the punk magazines came along, and I realized that’s what I’d wanted—I loved those fanzines.

But since the magazine deAk and Robinson published and edited, and wrote and designed and typeset and distributed, out of their downtown-Manhattan lofts between 1973 and 1978 was so open, democratic, and fresh-faced, they may think the parallel fine, or at least poetic justice: They and a third editor, Joshua Cohn, staged an exhilarating deconstruction (if an exhilarating deconstruction isn’t a contradiction in terms) not only of art but of art writing, so they must take what they get. The result was a staple-bound, disposable newsprint arts journal with gravitas that stood in contrast to the glossier and more staid magazines of the era like Artforum, marrying a fanzine ethos and proto-punk aesthetic. O’Doherty remembers, “ Artforum had the inside track, it was the hot center, which Art in America was trying to nudge into. The original paste-ups on view (or “mechanicals”) show the important and laborious preliminary steps in the photo offset-printing process. The cover artists were usually from an older generation than the editors or already had at least some reputation.

Doherty, Genesis P-Orridge, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Judy Pfaff, Lil Picard, Yvonne Rainer, Judy Rifka, Dorothea Rockburne, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, David Salle, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Serra, Jack Smith, Patti Smith , Robert Smithson, Holly Solomon, Naomi Spector, Nancy Spero, Pat Steir, Frank Stella, Al an Suicide (Vega), David Tremlett, Richard Tuttle, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, Hannah Wilke, Robert Wilson, Yuri, and Irene von Zahn. She would hurry through the office, laughing, vivid, bright-clothed, Hungarian, making herself briefly focal before she and Ingrid would run out to a gallery, a studio, a bar. While SoHo and TriBeCa had previously served as a hub for the activity by Fluxus artists who staged performances and events in lofts and galleries, beginning in the early 70s a new wave of artists began to see the possibilities of the affordable, vacant properties which offered enough room for live/work studio spaces. Through hundreds of interviews, reviews, statements and projects for the page--as well as artist-focused and thematic issues on video, painting, performance and artists' books-- Art-Rite's sharp editorial vision and commitment to holding up the work of artists stands as a meaningful and lasting contribution to the art history of New York and beyond.

Join us on Friday, May 26 (6–8PM) for the belated reception of From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite. Published in 1977, this issue of Art-Rite captures Vega at a high point in his career as a visual artist and musician, vividly capturing the late-70s New York sensibility. is pleased to present From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite, an exhibition coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the legendary underground arts magazine. From the Margins presents an extensive first-hand account into the making of Art-Rite, tracing the collaborative ethos and editorial decision-making of the magazine’s early years through various production materials, documentary photographs, ephemera, and original artwork.

DeAk has had various health- and life-related problems and by her own account has been “out of the picture for years. She took three pages for a cover, and we were very poor, and very conscious of it, but we did it,” says deAk. DEAK, ROBINSON, AND COHN MET in 1972, when they were all in their early twenties and the three of them took an art-criticism class taught by Brian O’Doherty at Barnard College in New York. Auctions including the most iconic works of art by modern and contemporary artists and auctions, named U-3, presenting, after careful evaluations, multiple and diverse works of art, ranging from works on paper, prints to ceramics.

It also affected the format, which was stylish and plain at the same time: that undated grant application, refreshingly droll, says of the magazine, “It is printed on newsprint in the belief that the low-cost process will help deinstitutionalize and demystify the esoterica it contains. We were riding on the absurdity of the situation—that we were three nobodies, had no money, had no fame, and didn’t know anybody in the art world. Ingrid tended to keep her meetings with Edit à deux, I suspected then (and have not changed my mind) because Edit contributed more to her plans for the magazine than she wanted to let the rest of us see.

A good deal of thought went into images, so that the issue is virtually a compendium of decisions on how to represent a book visually—whether to show the cover, or individual pages, or individual images cropped from their pages, or perhaps the book as an object, held open by somebody’s hands, which in deAk’s case might also hold a cigarette. how the covers of the issue were spread across the entirety of her SoHo loft as “a field of flowers. This approach allows the public to access different artistic contexts, promoting artistic movements and trends. Read through Art-Rite, though, and I doubt you’ll find an essay that you’ll think has the depth or ambition of O’Doherty’s “Inside the White Cube.