The Brooklyn Rail is a journal of arts, culture, and politics, currently published ten times a year, in Brooklyn, NY. The journal features in-depth interviews with artists, critics, and curators, as well as critical essays, fiction, poetry, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater. The Brooklyn Rail is distributed in galleries, universities, museums, bookstores, and other organizations. The Rail operates a small press called Rail Editions, which publishes literary translations, poetry, and art criticism. In addition to its small press, the Rail has also organized panel discussions, readings, film screenings, music and dance performances, and has curated exhibitions through a program called Rail Curatorial Projects.
History
Originally distributed as reading material for commuters on the L train between Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Rail began as a small broadsheet in 1998, with several founders. By 2000, the journal had quickly grown into a full-format publication, with Phong Bui and then-editor Theodore Hamm sharing oversight duties. Bui comments that it's largely due to support from the arts community, and funding from art foundations, that has made it possible for the journal to maintain its creative autonomy. Hamm notes that the Rail's non-profit funding, largely provided by private donors, has preserved the magazine's original aspiration to publish "a crucible of slanted opinions, artfully delivered."
Mission
The Rail aims to "reflect the complexity and inventiveness of the city’s artistic and cultural landscape."
Reception
has called it "the murmur of the city in print." Former Nation publisher Victor Navasky considered it "a non-establishment paper that questioned the establishment's assumptions without falling victim to the counterculture's pieties." For the late Nancy Spero, the paper was "an eminently readable, informative, and intellectually wide-ranging publication, alert to current trends, controversies, and ideas, and filled with necessary information." Poet John Ashbery has written: "how wonderful to have a new newspaper that cares about literature and the arts and isn't afraid to say so. The Brooklyn Rail is a welcome addition to the New York scene." American painter Alex Katz has said that the Rail "has the young energy that goes with the young people who come to New York to grow in the arts. It would be a bad city without it. If it wasn't for the Brooklyn Rail, the city would be a desert.” In 2013 the Rail was awarded the Best Art Reporting by the International Association of Art Critics, United States Section.
Rail Curatorial Projects
In 2013, the Brooklyn Rail established Rail Curatorial Projects, an initiative to manifest the journal's goals within an exhibition context. That same year, the Brooklyn Rail was invited by the Dedalus Foundation to curate an exhibition which resulted in Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year One, a momentous exhibition of hundreds of New York and Brooklyn artists. Come Together was named the #1 exhibition in New York City by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine and in the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote, “This egalitarian show makes palpable the greatness of New York’s real art world.” In 2014, the exhibition was commemorated in a hardcover catalogue. Since then, the Rail Curatorial Projects has curated a number of shows including Ad Reinhardt at 100 at TEMP Art Space; Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior at Red Bull Studios, Bloodflames Revisited at Paul Kasmin Gallery, and 24/7 at the Miami BeachMonte Carlo in 2014; Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable and Unreasonable Sized Paintings at SVA Chelsea Gallery and Mana Contemporary as well as Social Ecologies at Industry City, Patricia Cronin's Shrine for Girls at the Venice Biennale in 2015; and Hallway Hijack at 66 Rockwell Place in 2016. In 2017, Rail Curatorial Projects curated Occupy Mana: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy. In May 2019, the Rail was invited to curate an exhibition for the 2019 Venice Biennale. The show was a continuation of 2017's Occupy Mana, curated by the Rail's Phong Bui and Italian historian, Francesca Pietropaolo, the show consisted of 73 different artists; with works discussing the social and ecological climate of our reality titled Social Environment: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy. The Rail Curatorial Projects opened Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 2, in July 2019. The show was on the same lengths of Occupy Mana as well as Social Environment.
Rail Editions
Previous titles include: On Ron Gorchov, edited by Phong Bui; Pieces of a Decade: Brooklyn Rail Nonfiction 2000–2010, edited by Theodore Hamm and Williams Cole; Texts on Art, a collection of essays by the art historian Joseph Masheck; The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology 2, edited by Donald Breckenridge; Oh Sandy! A Remembrance,, a collection of poems commissioned in the wake of superstorm Hurricane Sandy; Cephalonia, a narrative poem by Luigi Ballerini; Swept Up By Art, the second memoir of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler; and Our Book: Florbela Espanca Selected Poems, the first translation into English of Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca's poetry. Most recently two books have been published, Words Apart and Others by Jonas Mekas as well as a companion of responses, Message Ahead.
