Artforum has a new top editor. Today it was announced that Tina Rivers Ryan, an art historian, curator, and critic, will take on the role of editor in chief of the storied art publication.
Ryan, 40, is a longtime contributor to Artforum and other art publications. Since 2017 she has been a curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where she has focused on video and digital art. Before that, she worked in the department of modern and contemporary art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a scholar of art history—Ryan holds a PhD in art history and archeology from Columbia University and BA in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University—she has long been interested in the intersection of art, technology, and societal change.
Her appointment follows several months of turmoil at Artforum. David Velasco, the magazine’s previous editor in chief, was fired last October after an open letter in response to the Israel-Hamas war, signed by thousands in the art world, was published on Artforum’s website. (The magazine’s publishers contended that the letter was “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process,” while Velasco told The New York Times that he was “disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”) Numerous staff members left and contributors pulled pieces after Velasco’s firing.
In the wake of all this, Ryan says she plans to continue the magazine’s longstanding tradition of publishing content that provokes deep thinking. “The concept of editorial independence is absolutely integral to Artforum—always has been and always will be,” she told Vogue earlier this week. “I fully plan on continuing the legacy that I’m inheriting from not just my immediate predecessor, but the last few editors who have all done such good work to make Artforum a publication that is trusted and bold.”
Ryan’s first issue at the magazine’s helm will be the this year’s Summer issue; her start date has not been confirmed.
Vogue spoke with Ryan earlier this week ahead of the announcement. Below, she discusses her background in academia and curation, her love of digital art, and what plans she has for Artforum under her leadership. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vogue: How did your interest in the art world first develop?
Tina Rivers Ryan: I was always a student of history. I thought I was going to be a medievalist. And it was only when I was forced to take a class in art history the spring of my freshman year [of undergrad] in order to satisfy a requirement that I realized art is actually a really powerful way of understanding history and thinking about societies and social change. The class was about Surrealist art in conversation with Surrealist film, Surrealist theater, Surrealist politics, Surrealist literature. And it helped me recognize that art history brings in so many other disciplines, from history and philosophy to economics, literature, psychology, physics, math. And so it drew me in as being this really rich, fertile discipline that would allow me to engage a really wide range of ideas. I quickly fell in with the way that modern and contemporary art amounted to a kind of urgent response to the creation of modern life and dealt with topics that, frankly, still feel really relevant. And on top of that, I got to spend all of my time looking at works of art, which, I think, is the best job anybody can have.
How did your work as a museum curator develop out of that?
When you’re a student of art history and you’re looking for internships or part-time jobs, museums are a great place to find those opportunities. I began working for various museums not only in curatorial departments, but also in the executive director’s office and in education programs, and I really fell in love with what museums do and being part of this larger conversation that opens up to broader publics. [In museums] you’re thinking about art as something that’s not just an object of inquiry, but something that’s part of people’s lives and can sort of shape conversations and give meaning and inspiration, or relief, or education. And so, in a sense, I think there’s a kind of natural transition, at least for me, from the academy into the space of the museum, and now moving into my work with Artforum, where my work would still be very much about facilitating these conversations and these experiences.
And why the pivot now to publishing?
I am and have always been a writer. English was always my subject when I was a kid. I think at this particular moment—there’s obviously a lot of ink that has been spilled about the state of public discourse—it feels incredibly urgent to carry forward the torch of deeply researched, carefully crafted, passionate argumentation. And that is precisely the kind of writing that Artforum has always excelled at supporting and finding audiences for. I also think that in this moment, what we really need are models of what it looks like to think critically, and experience deeply. And I think encountering art objects actually can be a way of training oneself to lead an examined life, to become open to and empathetic toward other perspectives.
How will your expertise in media art—digital art, video art, etc.—play a role in Artforum under your leadership?
I agree with many people who oppose this rhetorical structure of virtual or digital versus real or physical. Digital is reality. And I think that that’s become increasingly true for an increasing number of people around the world over the past 30 years. And so from where I stand, there is no contemporary art without media art, without digital art. I’m not saying that everything has to be digital now. But rather that if contemporary art is the art of its time, the art being made right now would obviously include artists who are negotiating with, reflecting upon, repressing the emergence of digital technologies, and their increasing ubiquity in our lives. You really can’t tell the story of, you know, art of the last 50 years without including those artists who were very much in direct dialogue with mainstream contemporary art, and yet were also engaging with these emerging technologies. And to be totally clear, I think some of the most engaging or critical work being made about technology right now actually isn’t made with technology at all.
How will you cover this kind of art in the magazine?
One of the things that I’m very excited about is expanding Artforum’s digital offerings. And mobilizing our existing platforms, and introducing new ways, on top of that, of presenting not just media art, but all forms of art, using the tools of video, or of “liveness,” or of the internet and social media. But to be clear, Artforum’s existence as a printed magazine is really the core of the magazine’s identity. I personally have a real attachment to the print issues. I’ve spent untold hours, probably months of my life, sitting in libraries and reading every single back issue. Okay, maybe not literally every single back issue, but a lot of them. And for many years now, I’ve always had some framed vintage issues of Artforum hung on the walls of my office, including the Summer 1967 issue, which has this incredible iridescent sculpture by Larry Bell on the cover and includes no less than three very canonical essays, including Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” and Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture, Part Three”—all in a single issue. And I think one thing that the printed magazine can provide is a kind of context for these ideas to relate to each other in a really special way, in the same way that one would curate objects in a room to speak to each other.
I am also very inspired by this moment of multimedia publishing. When I was a student, 20 or 30 years ago, textbooks started coming with CD-ROMs. And there were a number of exhibition catalogs featuring video artworks that actually included, like, a DVD in the back with the artworks on them. This was in the days before the ubiquity of online digital video. I’ve been wanting to really revisit that moment and think about what it would look like to understand the internet as a curatorial platform.
You’ve had these other roles throughout your life in the art world, but this is the first time you’ll be an editor in chief. What, to you, is the role of the Artforum editor in chief at this moment in time?
I think that right now, we are seeing a bit of a chilling effect in which people are feeling like there are things that cannot be said. And I think Artforum, for a long time now, has been a space for artists and writers to participate in activism and advocacy. And given the multiple ongoing crises that we’re facing, and that are impacting many people in the arts, I think Artforum really needs to continue to be a platform for that kind of work as part of its overall project of highlighting the conversations that are really defining contemporary art. The making of meaning is something that I really look to artists and to writers and to the larger community of the art world to help us figure out together.