Submission Guidelines for ARTMargins Print Journal

Articles

ARTMargins invites submissions of articles (max. 7500 words). The journal publishes material related to the histories of 20th-century and contemporary art, art theory, art institutions, and curatorship. It places special emphasis on marginal histories and innovative, critical and methodological perspectives. The editors are particularly interested in submissions that consider art within sociocultural, political, and theoretical contexts. They also welcome attention to the work of artists and art thinkers who work outside of English-speaking and official circuits. Submissions may also consider, among other things, questions pertaining to art and politics, periodization and historicization—including the contemporary—sovereignty, post colonialism, decolonization, the notion of the global, and/or the transition from and towards socialism.

Articles should be between 5,500 and 7,500 words and ideally not be focused on a single artist, or a single artwork. We encourage submissions that combine the analysis of artworks with a careful consideration of broader historical, methodological, and/or theoretical issues. These may, but do not have to, focus on one national context or historical formation from the history of 20th and 21-century art. Articles may be based on archival research, and/or they may address more philosophically, politically, or theoretically oriented topics that have some bearing on the history of contemporary art.

Review Essays

ARTMargins also welcomes the submission of review essays of 3,500-4,500 words in length dedicated to recent exhibitions or books (or a combination of the two) that deal with artistic practice, history, criticism or theory in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is our hope that such articles might highlight tendencies, regions, histories, ideologies, methodological approaches or problems that have been overlooked by, or brush against the grain of dominant discourse. Rather than merely describing or endorsing a given work or exhibition, we invite authors to think of their submissions as critical interventions in a broader field of practice, history or critique, without however neglecting the more traditional critical functions of a review. Exhibition reviews may choose to discuss the curatorial, historical or institutional context of one exhibition or art fair, or bring two or more such events into dialogue. Likewise, book reviews may focus on one work, analyzing the nature of its intervention into a given field, for example, or may discuss two or more related works. In the latter case, they should provide a descriptive and critical account of each of the works individually, and explain the relation they sustain with one another under a unifying thesis or perspective. We are especially interested in review essays that privilege very recent works or contextualize books and exhibitions produced outside of the English-speaking world.

Artist Projects

ARTMargins invites proposals for the journal's Artist Project section. 10-16 pages in every issue of ARTMargins is handed over to an artist whom the editors invite to develop a new work especially for the journal. We are interested in receiving contributions that engage, within the format of a print journal, the idea of the margins formally, aesthetically, conceptually, and/or historically from an innovative perspective and/or visual language. We initially invite 400-word proposals after which the editors may extend an invitation to submit a project draft.

Documents

ARTMargins also invites submissions for its “Documents” section, which presents the first English translations of artist texts, short essays, manifestos, interviews, and other texts that have transformed cultural histories in countries as diverse as Armenia and Chile, Estonia and China. We welcome proposals and submissions that continue this dedication to introduce readers to some of the most important writings in art and curatorial histories outside Anglophone contexts. In addition to translating the document into English, we invite authors to contribute a short prefatory essay setting out the document’s core arguments, addressing its significance within its original cultural context, and explaining its ongoing resonance for global art histories today. Together, the translation and commentary should total 5,000-6,000 words in length, while the document proposed should have the potential to serve as a primary source for a broad range of researchers internationally.

Peer Review Taxonomy

Submissions

Please send inquiries to the managing editor at managing.ed.artmargins@gmail.com. All submissions are evaluated by two commissioned peer-reviewers per article, using a blind review process. For full details on how to submit a manuscript, please reference the ARTMargins Style Sheet.