And … we are back! That’s right, after a nine-month hibernation, Square Cylinder has returned, providing critical coverage of visual art exhibitions in northern California. Founding publisher David M. Roth has passed the baton to DeWitt Cheng, Bill Lasarow and myself, each bringing decades of experience assessing the visual arts. With a re-vamped visual format and a team of veteran commentators, we hereby resume and expand the mission that Mr. Roth initiated fifteen years ago: to provide serious visual arts criticism for readers interested in the cultural landscape northern California. Thanks to the enthusiastic support that we have already received, we are proud to resume this mission at a time when freedom of expression is facing renewed political attack.
Even though we are retaining many of Square Cylinder’s original website design features, longtime readers will note a few important changes that will extend its outreach. One of these will be the addition of Commentary articles that will explore general issues related to the visual arts, complementing the exhibition reviews that will be the mainstay of Square Cylinder’s regular content. The publication’s reviews and commentaries articles will have a new audio feature that can enable the reader to listen to them on their phones or computers. To meet the demand of exhibition venues operating with modest budgets, we have added a listing page that can provide informational updates about events, times and locations of programs.
Some of Square Cylinder’s content will be sent to our more than 30,000 subscribers in the form of the new SqC eNewsletter, featuring the latest reviews and commentaries, and our Email Announcement Service, featuring exhibitions presented by our sponsoring art galleries and museums. As has been the case since the publication’s inception, all content will be posted quickly while exhibitions are still up and available for in-person visits. We invite our readers to see them and measure their own reactions against those of our contributing art critics.
We are already looking ahead to future enhancements to Square Cylinder’s operation. One of these will be our initiation of the Cecile McCann Prize for Art Journalism, which will be a cash award that recognizes extraordinary achievement in visual arts commentary. Cecile McCann was the founding publisher for a weekly art magazine called Artweek, which operated in the Bay Area from 1970 to 2009. Her initial vision was expansive in that it provided a wide net of coverage that highlighted the programing of a great many venues, undertaken at a time when the northern California art world was much smaller than it is now. Her editorial philosophy of encouraging a multitude of artistic and critical voices anticipated the concerns about diversity and inclusion decades before they became part of the mainstream arts discourse. In many ways, when David Roth started Square Cylinder, he used Artweek’s generous editorial policy as a guiding model for what he sought to accomplish. We are now heirs to that legacy.
