What was adobeairstream, anyway?

Photoville Santa Fe

Today is January 25, 2022. Adobeairstream first took shape over a small table where Leanne Goebel and I sat having coffee in Santa Fe. This was maybe 2008, summer, and it was during a trip to Aspen that year to visit one of my best friends that I recognized with clarity the end of my former professional life and a sense of a mission to restart a new one. I wasn’t the only one with a mission. Leanne had just been or that year was an Andy Warhol|Creative Capital fellow for her Colorado arts blog. I had been a hotheaded young journalism entrepreneur once before (that was short-lived.) I felt absolutely convinced Adobeairstream would make it both for readers’ interest and as a low-profit but steady vehicle for art galleries, nonprofits, event spaces and other venues in the west to advertise in. When the word “blog” was both ubiquitous and implied a built-in sneer, my regional arts magazine (online) was maybe three contradictory things: too big for its britches, holding a relatively thin though ambitious pocketbook (and it made up in amperage what it lacked in champagne.)

As I write these words at my computer in New York, it is 13 years later. On this coming ides of March 2022 Adobeairstream celebrates its launch-aversary and also a few digits with its end-phase year 2015. Just in these last seven years, so much else has happened! Or not happened, or started to happen then faltered, for all of us. My great friend Doug Newville, who wrote for this blog and started a YouTube video channel that garnered more than a million views, died suddenly almost at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. I lost my dear girl and radio mentee Hannah Colton to suicide in November 2020. I separated from my husband and my New Mexico life and moved back to New York in 2018. Where now I teach journalism at Pratt Institute, just finished making a new podcast about science and art, and spend plenty of time at my very old farmhouse in the Hudson valley. I have an ongoing, close and elastic connection with New Mexico. My pal David D’Arcy is still at work as a film critic and writer. I have new journalism peers with whom perhaps the adage about old bottles remains true.

This site remains a real wonder of mutual effort and mutual aid. Me, Leanne, David, Doug were the core four. To our sides flocked many others: Katy and Rowan to steer us through Austin, Conrad Skinner for his architecture and art writing, Hilary Stunda, other and more names than I’m calling to mind now. We did a few really fun projects of which my favorite was the Minneapolis Institute of Art ice-hut recording studio at the More Real show, curated by Liz Armstrong. At a SITE Santa Fe biennial, Amy Westphal loaned one of her actual Airstream collection, and we made a sound booth of it. Thanks ongoingly to my friend Dennis Jasso of Nosotros, with whom I still collaborate!

Geet Jacobs, are you out there?

So much more can be said. So much more needs to be said to keep daily and weekly journalism alive. I am especially pleased to be writing my first art feature for a new daily newspaper that is hyperlocal in Red Hook, New York. Not Red Hook, Brooklyn. But Red Hook, Duchess county, roughly 90 miles north of the city. There a daily news journalist and Pulitzer winner has been turning her mind and energies to a local online publication. In the Bay Area, my friend Kat Rowlands is a role model. Please consider supporting women-owned businesses and also new local journalism models where you live.

When I got back to New York it was September 2018. I. moved into the apartment where I still live in my former home neighborhood of the East Village. I did see a few incredible shows. Leon Golub, Gerhard Richter, a few Met shows at the Met Breuer after it was the Whitney and before it is now temporary home to the Frick collection. In March 2020, everything stopped. It is nearly two years later and things re-started, then paused, then seemed to stop, then paused and started, and now I believe are about to restart in earnest, just because we humans don’t have this much isolation in us.

I’ll post some random things about art here. They won’t all be brand new as some of the pieces percolated on the backend of this website for a long while before I decided to leave Adobeairstream ticking, for perpetuity and the great reminder that a collective of strong writer energies and dedication to contributing expert criticism to the arts, started this thing, then kept driving it down the road.

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