Editors: Dorota Biczel Nelson and Ania Szremski
Copy-editors: Monica LaBelle and Jacqueline WayneGuite
Layout Design: Dorota Biczel Nelson
“Professional degrees in arts administration are becoming staple fare in universities, but the field remains amorphous, lacking the conscious theorization of other academic disciplines. An acute need to verbalize exactly what arts administrators do and why it matters inspired the creation of e-merge: journal of arts administration and policy, a peer-reviewed online journal produced by graduate students in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Arts Administration and Policy program. We hope that e-merge will become a platform on which the most pertinent questions in arts administration will be debated by students and professionals in the field.
This special print issue of e-merge features a series of interviews with the diverse professionals engaged in Art Chicago 2009. It presents an insider’s perspective from the trenches of one of the most hotly discussed events in the city’s cultural landscape. Interviews with the fair’s key administrators and curators (including Tony Karman, Mark Falanga, Jessica Cochran, Christian Viveros-Faune, Lynne Warren, Mary Jane Jacobs, Susanne Ghez and Chris Kennedy) touch on a nexus of fundamental questions that have become more pressing than ever before. These questions concern the relationship of art to the market; the viability of traditional vehicles of distribution for art; art’s political, social, and civic dimensions; and tensions between local and global, among others. Many of these questions will become through-lines in future issues of e-merge.”