In Praise of Alissa Wilkinson and Curator Magazine

Published on August 27, 2010 by Christy Tennant

One of the beautiful things about International Arts Movement is the generative entrepreneurial spirit that is embedded deeply in the movement's DNA. Years ago, Executive Director Bryan Horvath began using a phrase that has been incredibly liberating, when he gave his team the freedom to “fail spectacularly.” His motto is, don't do anything half-heartedly. If we're going to try something new, we're going to do it with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength, and if, at day's end, it fails, it should fail spectacularly. Oh, and it is never one person's failure; we are in this together. We celebrate our wins as a team, and we celebrate our spectacular failures as a team. That freedom has enabled each of us on staff to bring wild ideas to the table at Space 38|39 and actually have a shot at pulling them off, largely because solo ideas don't stay solo for long. Our team dynamic means that when one person has an idea, there is soon a united front behind it – sink or swim.

Thankfully, while we know we are free to fail, we usually don't. Case in point: nearly two and a half years ago, before she was even on staff with the movement, Alissa Wilkinson came to the IAM staff with an idea for an online magazine. Birthed out of a Wednesday morning discussion group conversation with fellow creative catalyst Kevin Gosa, the idea, as Alissa writes in this week's Curator Magazine, was a web-based culture magazine, aggressively omnivorous, which would merrily ignore the established periodical wisdom of 'timeliness' and simply go after culture in an exuberant, wide-ranging celebration of the best things humans make and do. Most culture publications spend a lot of time bellyaching or berating, or focusing on the established and well-known; we’d be here to expose readers to the good and think carefully about the dubious.”

We loved the idea. We knew that if anyone had the editorial chops to oversee it, it was Alissa Wilkinson, who had been deeply involved with International Arts Movement and had already proven herself as a skilled writer and cultural commentator through film criticism and articles in magazines like Christianity Today, World, Paste, Comment and Relevant magazine's sister pub, Radiant. We readily agreed to get behind Alissa's vision. IAM's Makoto Fujimura, Kevin Gosa and yours truly were among the first contributors, and on August 29, 2008, the first issue of IAM's online magazine, The Curator, launched.

This week, we are elated to high-five Alissa Wilkinson and the entire creative team behind The Curator for two years of a spectacularly successful “wide-ranging celebration of the best things humans make and do.” We are profoundly grateful for Alissa's inestimable contributions to IAM, first as a participant in the Wednesday morning discussion group and, in recent years, as a staff member.

As Alissa writes in this week's Curator, however, “The Times, They Are A-Changin'.” Alissa's heart has long been in the halls of higher education, as both a student (she completed her Master's from NYU during her tenure with IAM) and as a teacher. In fact, she has been teaching part-time for The King's College for nearly as long as she has been working for International Arts Movement, so it was no surprise when the Powers That Be there recognized what a treasure Alissa Wilkinson is and made her a full-time offer she could not refuse. At the beginning of this month, we took Alissa out for a farewell lunch and celebrated her with foliage (a plant for her new desk at King's) and ale.

There is a bit of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge in our “farewell,” however; King's is located in the Empire State Building, exactly four blocks away from International Arts Movement's Space 38|39, and we have no intention of truly letting Alissa go. She will remain involved with IAM, especially our Readers Guild, Cinema Series, and, of course, The Curator.

There is more news about the changes at The Curator, which you can read about here and here. But for now, I simply want to honor Alissa Wilkinson for her many talents, gifts, and contributions. We are grateful that she is part of International Arts Movement, past, present, and future.