BOMB Magazine

BOMB Magazine is a New York City–based arts and culture periodical founded in 1981 that emphasizes artist-to-artist dialogue across visual art, literature, film, theater, music, and architecture. It publishes interviews, essays, reviews, and original creative work, combining conversations with figures from contemporary art scenes such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Trisha Brown, Laurie Anderson, and Kara Walker. The magazine operates as a non-profit organization and maintains a substantial online archive that documents exchanges among practitioners including writers, filmmakers, composers, curators, and performers.

History

Brought together by artists, editors, and gallerists in Manhattan in 1981, the magazine emerged during the same decade that saw institutions and events like The Whitney Biennial, Documenta, The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center shape contemporary practice. Founders including Betsy Sussler and Sarah Charlesworth assembled an editorial collective responsive to the New York scenes connected to figures such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Philip Glass, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Through the 1980s and 1990s BOMB published dialogues with practitioners linked to movements and moments represented by Minimalism, Postmodernism, Fluxus, Graffiti art, and institutions like Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Tate Modern, expanding its remit into international networks involving artists such as Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger.

Editorial Mission and Format

The editorial mission centers on peer-to-peer conversation: editors pair creators to interview one another, producing formats that foreground exchange among figures like Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges, Harold Bloom, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Beckett. Regular sections include in-depth interviews, serialized fiction and poetry from contributors like Allen Ginsberg, Maya Angelou, Haruki Murakami, and Joyce Carol Oates, critical essays, and visual portfolios showcasing photographers and artists such as Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Helmut Newton, and Anselm Kiefer. The magazine also publishes themed issues and curates editorial pairings that highlight overlaps between creators associated with organizations like Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, Sotheby's, and MoMA PS1.

Notable Contributors and Interviews

Over the decades BOMB has featured interviews and original work by a wide array of prominent figures: writers and poets including James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel García Márquez, Ivy Compton-Burnett; visual artists and photographers such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Elizabeth Peyton, Ed Ruscha, Ai Weiwei; filmmakers and theater practitioners like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Agnes Varda, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson; and musicians and composers such as John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Patti Smith. Contributors and interviewees have included curators and critics affiliated with institutions like Tate Modern, The Getty, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The National Gallery.

Publications and Special Projects

Beyond the quarterly/periodic issues, the organization has produced anthologies, thematic booklets, and online archives collecting discussions, scripts, and artist projects involving practitioners connected to festivals and series such as Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and Coachella. Special projects have paired collaborators across disciplines—for example, playwrights with painters, composers with choreographers—linking names like Samuel Beckett, Pina Bausch, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, Annie Leibovitz, and Garry Winogrand. The magazine's archives document early-career conversations with many artists later represented by galleries such as Gagosian Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and White Cube.

Reception and Influence

Critics, curators, and academics have noted the magazine's role in shaping discourse among creators and chronicling late 20th- and early 21st-century cultural networks involving figures like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin, and Michael Fried. Scholars cite interviews and primary materials from the magazine in studies of movements and practitioners tied to exhibitions at institutions including Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian Institution. Its influence is visible in artist-run journals, university programs in creative writing and visual studies at institutions such as Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, and Pratt Institute, and in digital archives preserving exchanges among generations of creators.

Category:Magazines established in 1981 Category:Arts magazines published in the United States Category:English-language magazines