Today, you are going to get something free from us: an excerpt from our Editor’s Note by Evan Pricco from Issue 03, which is now available in what we like to say is a “pre-order.”

I wrote most of this letter sitting on a crab dock in Garibaldi, Oregon, thinking about magic. First things first, I have never been on a crab dock before, never been crab-fishing, and, considering I didn’t catch any crabs, I might not be invited back. So it goes. Back to the task at hand: I don’t know exactly why I was thinking of magic, maybe it was all the conversations I’d been having about something spiritual happening, something historic, something current. Or maybe it was because of a quiet collective wish for magic to happen again. I didn’t know where this issue was headed until the very last interview I did for it. And to be fair, it usually happens this way; a bow is tied, a “t” is crossed, and an idea is fully fleshed out. This issue is about being exactly where you are supposed to be.

For context, Robin F. Williams told me about their own moment of magic. It happened in 2024, at the opening of a survey of their work at the Columbus Museum of Art. The survey had paintings from twenty years ago hanging next to paintings from last year all in the same room, in the city Robin grew up in and had just moved back to after decades in Brooklyn. And on that exact day of the opening, the Great North American Eclipse passed over the sky. Downtown Columbus experienced a 99.6% partial eclipse, literally at the center of this rare celestial event. Which is, to be honest, kind of magical, spiritual even. Robin looked at all of it—the past and the present of their own work, the ordinary sky gone strange above them—and said something like: “I think this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.” Right here, right now.

I don’t fully know why that line hit me the way it did. But it became the thread running under everything else in this issue—the way I found myself looking at every artist we talk about here, whether they made their most important work seventy years ago, a hundred and fifty years ago, or this year. In every case, we’re really asking the same question: why were they exactly where they were supposed to be? Why that moment? Why did they make it, and why wouldn’t it exist without them?

Maybe none of this is literally about magic. It’s just about being exactly where you’re supposed to be in history, and understanding that people define and make history every single day, in real time, through the choices they make about where to stand and what to pay attention to. I don’t think I understood what Issue 03 was trying to do until Robin said it out loud. We’re trying to tell you, twenty-seven times over in this issue, why these artists created the moments they created—why the moment was theirs to take, theirs to make, theirs to articulate, theirs to give a shape and a color and a form to.

This issue contains stories about being in the right moment, and knowing it, and telling it so it’s apparent to everybody else, too. —Evan Pricco

Issue 03 is available now, featuring stories +essays on Studio Lenca, Danielle Mckinney, Roy DeCarava, Thomas Houseago, Italian Radical Design, Jenny Morgan, Ibrahim Mahama, Harmonia Rosales, Suzanne Valadon, Kelly Beeman, Christopher Anderson, David Salle, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Ju Young Kim, Robin F. Williams, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Rachel Rosenthal and Instant Theatre, Tidawhitney Lek, Timo Fahler, a factory visit to orSlow in Japan, Daniel S. Palmer of SCAD MOA, Erin Holly, 30 Years of Fredericks & Freiser, a travel journal through the Georgian art scene + Where To Brows with Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro and Chloe Fineman.

Published on