by Mark Tungate (@MarkTungate) Creative magazines have begun expanding beyond print, and opening exhibition spaces. I was intrigued to hear that Kinfolk magazine has launched its own gallery space in Copenhagen.
You may know Kinfolk. At first glance, it looks like something of a hipsters’ bible — a perception compounded by originally being published in Portland, Oregon. It features fabulously good-looking people eating and socialising in earthy, often rural, settings that nonetheless look entirely inaccessible to most of us.
The magazine was founded in 2011 by Nathan Williams, who set it up as a passion project while working as an analyst at finance giant, Goldman Sachs. Over the years, Kinfolk has grown into the “slow-living” bible of the creative set.
Dispropotionate influence
As Dezeen magazine points out, the Kinfolk aesthetic has had a disproportionate influence upon Instagram — and design in general. Indeed, Williams is also behind a content company called Ouur Media, which has worked with brands ranging from Diesel and LG Electronics to Zara. As befits its affection for Scandinavian design, Kinfolk is now based in Copenhagen and its gallery (above) opened on 2 June 2016.
All this got me wondering if there were any other magazines that had gone ahead and opened art galleries. One of the first I came across was Polka, a photography magazine based right here in Paris. Polka specialises in photojournalism and was set up in 2007 by Alain Genestar, a veteran journalist who had worked for Le Monde and Paris Match, among others.
The gallery, in the arty Marais district, opened that same year and is run by Genestar’s children, Edouard Genestar and the wonderfully named Adélie de Ipanema. Its mission, they say, is to compare past and present works of photographic art and the way they represent and document world events. At the time of writing, it was showing the work of a trio of Italian photographers, Luigi Ghirri, Mario Giacomelli and Claude Nori.
Certainly innovative
Another publication with a public space is Cabinet, a quarterly art and culture magazine based in New York. A rather strange and edgy-looking affair, it’s certainly innovative: every issue, for example, contains a column called “Colors”, in which writers “from scientists to poets” are invited to discuss a specific colour and what it means to them.
The novelist Jonathan Ames — something of a favourite of mine — describes Cabinet as “unrelenting…in its madcap curiosity. Opening an issue of Cabinet is like finding out that Karl Marx is related to the Marx brothers”.
Cabinet opened its “art space” in Brooklyn in October 2008. It includes an exhibition area, a reading lounge and a 64-seat screening room.
“Urban art”
Remaining in the US, this April, entrepreneur Joseph Wilkerson opened a gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina, called ArtSpace Uptown — along with a magazine called ArtBoss. It specialises in “urban art”. As well as giving artists a place to “hang out”, he told local website Triad City Beat, it will include “paint battles, producer-on-producer beat battles, film festivals, a comic book convention and an interactive fashion show”, as well as a hip-hop play. In short, coolness.
With mainstream media suffering as readers migrate to digital, it makes sense that magazines would want to create a physical incarnation of their world. Especially if they’re promoting creativity.
- Know any other magazines with galleries? Please give me a shout at mark at epica-awards dot com
Mark Tungate (@MarkTungate) is the editorial director of the Epica Awards (@EpicaAwards), the only global creative prize judged by the specialist press. In this series of articles called Design Plus, Epica is highlighting creativity in the design field.
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