The mission of Art Journal, founded in 1941, is to provide a forum for scholarship and visual exploration in the visual arts; to be a unique voice in the field as a peer-reviewed, professionally mediated forum for the arts; to operate in the spaces between commercial publishing, academic presses, and artist presses; to be pedagogically useful by making links between theoretical issues and their use in teaching at the college and university levels; to explore relationships among diverse forms of art practice and production, as well as among art making, art history, visual studies, theory, and criticism; to give voice and publication opportunity to artists, art historians, and other writers in the arts; to be responsive to issues of the moment in the arts, both nationally and globally; to focus on topics related to twentieth- and twenty-first-century concerns; to promote dialogue and debate. The quarterly journal, which welcomes submissions from authors and artists worldwide and at every career stage, is published four times a year in spring, summer, autumn, and winter by the College Art Association.
Art Journal Open takes advantage of the unique qualities of the web to present artists’ projects, scholarly essays, conversations and interviews, notes from the field, artifacts of materials and process, and news items. The site embraces the evolving nature of multimedia formats and techniques, seeking to serve as a provisional, suggestive, and projective archive for contemporary art.
Contributors include artists, scholars, critics, curators, researchers, archivists, librarians, and other cultural producers who generate primary source material of contemporary art and the interpretative network that coalesces into the historical record. Operating on an open platform, the website is committed to fostering new intellectual exchanges.
The independently edited, open access Art Journal Open website publishes content on a rolling basis.