Photo: Lynne Tillman

 

Lower Manhattan. 1980. Night.

A few artists, writers, and actors are sitting around a kitchen table. And I say, Let’s start a magazine: one where artists are able to speak about their work the way in which we speak about it amongst ourselves. And everyone says, Great idea, let’s do it. One year and many conversations later, the first issue of BOMB went to press on a $3,000 loan.

BOMB Magazine was founded in 1981 as an artists’ and writers’ quarterly dedicated to presenting work in its own light, and artists’ and writers’ conversations in their own words.

 

Brooklyn. 2007. Day.

26 years later, more than 800 visual artists, writers, musicians, directors, architects, and actors have taken that idea and run with it. Their voices comprise an ongoing conversation—published in the pages of BOMB—that has changed the nature of cultural discourse.

BOMB has since grown to become an international magazine with an editorial board of over 80 professional artists, writers, actors, directors, architects, and musicians serving as our Contributing Editors.

Revelations happen in conversations. They make art more accessible, not only to the reader, but to the artists themselves. For 26 years, BOMB’s mission has remained intact: To reveal the intellectual heart of the matter, and to promote an understanding and appreciation of the arts through carefully developed conversations about the arts, by the people who make the arts.

Focusing on ideas rather than personalities, BOMB interviews delve into discussions of process and aesthetics, allowing for the emergence of complex and varied positions on art making and life throughout editorial revisions. These interviews have become primary documents of American cultural history because artists, the primary source of the creative process, are the authors of their own tales. This simple idea of complex proportions has changed the way in which contemporary culture is understood. The pendulum has swung from the days the critic held sway.

Today, universities, museums, and art institutions across America include the artist’s voice as integral to their programming, a direct result of BOMB’s effect on the culture. And when the pendulum swings again, BOMB will remain an artists’ and writers’ spokespiece. That is BOMB’s mandate: its commitment to the artists.

In 2005, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the last quarter-century of BOMB’s archive—including audio files, marginalia, and multiple drafts of hundreds of our interviews—where they will be accessible to students and scholars worldwide—a true testament to BOMB’s legacy.
 

—BETSY SUSSLER, Co-Founder, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief