Umbrella was an art newsletter or informal magazine that ran for three decades, from 1978 to 2008. Its focus was on artist's books and related media, and it has been credited as an important factor in the emergence and visibility of artist's books from Southern California. [1]
Umbrella was founded by curator Judith Hoffberg in 1978, and she remained its editor for the duration of its existence. [2] [3] Appearing irregularly, between 2 and 6 times a year, Umbrella focused on artist's books and related printed matter such as mail art, Xerox art, and photobooks. [2] [4] Hoffberg had a particular interest in Fluxus art and artist's books that took a semi-sculptural form. [2] The newsletter regularly featured profiles of artists, exhibition reviews, book reviews, and general news about the art world. [4]
During the spring of 1996 there was a retrospective of all Umbrella newsletters (1978-1996) in Guy Bleus' E-Mail Art Archives in the provincial Centre for Arts (now Art Museum Z33) in Hasselt, Belgium. [5] [6]
Umbrella was published in black-and-white until 2002, after which its covers were in color. It ceased print publication in 2005, after which it had an online edition until 2008. [2] The journal ended publication altogether when Hoffberg fell ill in 2008; she died the following year. [2] [1] The entire print run of the magazine has been digitized by the Herron School of Art and Design and is available free online. [2]
Ruud Janssen is a Dutch Fluxus and mail artist currently living in Breda in the Netherlands.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s, though it has since developed into a global movement that continues to the present.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
Xerox art is an art form that began in the 1960s. Prints are created by putting objects on the glass, or platen, of a copying machine and by pressing "start" to produce an image. If the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, or the object is moved, the resulting image is distorted in some way. The curvature of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, and the distance of the cover from the glass, all affect the final image. Often, with proper manipulation, rather ghostly images can be made. Basic techniques include: Direct Imaging, the copying of items placed on the platen ; Still Life Collage, a variation of direct imaging with items placed on the platen in a collage format focused on what is in the foreground/background; Overprinting, the technique of constructing layers of information, one over the previous, by printing onto the same sheet of paper more than once; Copy Overlay, a technique of working with or interfering in the color separation mechanism of a color copier; Colorizing, vary color density and hue by adjusting the exposure and color balance controls; Degeneration is a copy of a copy degrading the image as successive copies are made; Copy Motion, the creation of effects by moving an item or image on the platen during the scanning process. Each machine also creates different effects.
Ryosuke Cohen is a mail artist. He was responsible for the Brain Cell mail art project, which he began in June 1985 and retains thousands of members in more than 80 countries, e.g. Hans Braumüller, Theo Breuer, Michael Leigh or Litsa Spathi. In August 2001 he began the Fractal Portrait Project. He has taught art to school children for more than 25 years.
High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine based out of Los Angeles founded in 1978 and published until 1997. Its editorial mission was to provide support and a critical context for new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts.
Judith Hoffberg was a librarian, archivist, lecturer, a curator and art writer, and editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artist's books, mail art, and Fluxus art.
The Art Libraries Society of North America was founded in 1972. It is an organization made up of approximately 1,000 art librarians, library students and visual resource professionals.
Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.
Barbara Ann Rosenthal is an American avant-garde artist, writer and performer. Her existential themes have contributed to contemporary art and philosophy. Her pseudonyms include "Homo Futurus," taken from the title of one of her books and "Cassandra-on-the-Hudson," which alludes to "the dangerous world she envisions" while creating art in her studio and residence, located since 1998 on the Hudson River in Greenwich Village, NYC. She successfully trademarked "Homo Futurus" in 2022.
Vittore Baroni, is an Italian mailartist, music critic and explorer of countercultures. Since the mid-1970s he has been one of the most active and respected promoters and documenters of mail art.
John Held Jr. , is an American mailartist, author and performance artist who has been an active participant in alternative art since 1975, particularly in the fields of rubber stamp art, zine culture, and artistamps. He is one of the most prominent and respected promoters and chroniclers of mail art.
Guy Bleus is a Belgian artist, archivist and writer. He is associated with olfactory art, visual poetry, performance art and the mail art movement.
Anna Banana is a Canadian artist known for her performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "entrepreneur and critic", and pioneered the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She has been prominent in the mail art movement since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement's early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996.
Gonzo (circus) is a Dutch-language bi-monthly culture and music magazine, first published in 1991 in Belgium. It is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The magazine primarily focuses on contemporary musical genres such as punk, industrial, hip hop, jazz, improvised music, modern classical music, indie rock, noise, electronic music and world music. The founders are Stefan Joosten and Dirk Vreys. Since 1995 each publication is accompanied by a compilation CD under the name Mind the Gap, featuring new artists.
Valentin Gallery is an art gallery in Quebec. Created in 1934, it was first called "L'Art français" and had its start on Laurier Street in Montreal. Owners Lucienne (1900-1992) and Louis (1890-1956) Lange initially showed works by French artists. By the 1940s they were offering art by Marc-Aurèle Fortin and Philip Surrey. In 1975, Jean-Pierre Valentin purchased the gallery. The gallery moved to its present Sherbrooke Street location later and changed the name to Valentin Gallery.
Ginny Lloyd is an American artist, noted for her work with mail art, photocopy art, performance art and photography. She organized the Copy Art Exhibition in San Francisco in 1980 with programming devoted to promoting xerography. Her work was included in the exhibition, From Bonnard to Baselitz: A Decade of Acquisitions by the Prints Collection 1978–1988 and listed annually since 1992 in Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
Chuck Welch, also known as the CrackerJack Kid or Jack Kid, was born in Kearney, Nebraska in 1948. He wrote "Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology", with a foreword by Ken Friedman, which was published and edited by University of Calgary Press in 1995. The Eternal Network and the Crackerjack Kid were mentioned in a review of mail art titled "Pushing the Envelope" in 2001, and the archivist and curator Judith Hoffberg wrote about him in her publication Umbrella. His awards include a Fulbright Grant and NEA Hilda Maehling Fellowship.
Judith Kapstein Brodsky is an American artist, curator, and author known for her contributions to feminist discourse in the arts. She received her B.A. from Harvard University where she majored in Art History, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. A printmaker herself, Brodsky is founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in 1996, later renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor in September 2006, and which later joined the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2018. She was also co-founder, with Ferris Olin, of the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University in 2006. She was the first artist appointed as president of the Women's Caucus for Art, an active Affiliated Society of the College Art Association.