Art + Type Magazine stresses care in collectivism
PHOTO BY MANASA GUDAVALLI
By Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer ARTS EDITOR
Collectives are often born on paper. When like-minded artists come together and put their shared ideas on the page, they sign their names to a mission that will drive their ambitions from then on. The typed-up page becomes the catalyst that pushes artists with shared ideals to create. By offering up the printed page to emerging artists, Art + Type Magazine acts as the lifeblood of future collaborative art families. Founded by current Steinhardt juniors Susan Behrends Valenzuela and Natalia Palacino during their first year at NYU, Art + Type Magazine, a print publication, is an open space for artists to grow together. (Valenzuela is a creative director at WSN and Palacino has contributed illustrations and articles.) Personal testimonies are rendered as a collective existence in the pages of Art + Type Magazine. Exhibiting a myriad of different art mediums from a diverse array of contributors, the magazine functions as an accessible resource of inspiration for all those who come across its pages. Palacino described the magazine as “creativity, diversity, collaboration, inspiring.” From its inception, Art + Type Magazine was an invitation to the world. The platform’s founders posted an open call on Instagram for the first issue of the magazine almost immediately after deciding to embark on the project together. They were eager
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for art and received an influx of submissions, which they carefully reviewed over the following months before publishing their first issue. “We got a lot of things, we got really weird things, but also some really good art — and it was really nice to learn a lot of people have really good things, but they just don’t know what to do with it,” Palacino said. “It was about launching a platform for people to show their work, share who they are and why they do what they do. It was about creating a space for art and helping people publicize it.” As they worked tirelessly on Adobe InDesign to put together the layout of their first issue, Art + Type’s two-person editing team was also building a family, concretizing it in printed matter. Every artist they took into their publication’s pages became part of a web, acting as the building blocks of a nascent art collective. Through Art + Type, disconnected artists around the globe suddenly had friends to turn to if they needed advice on a long-gestating project or a gaffer on a sudden photo shoot. “You’re not just contributing, but engaging with other artists in ways that seem truthful,” said Tisch junior Carlos Hernandez, a photography student who wrote the introduction to Art + Type’s latest issue. “The space they’ve created allows us to interact with each other and understand each other’s work.” Although the speed with which Art + Type Magazine’s founders created their collective belies the care they put into the making of the
