BRIDGE is an artistic collective and our registered, 501 (c) 3 Illinois not for profit corporation (“Bridge Art, Nfp”) is a publishing and programming organization.

An independent Chicago journal, Bridge began in the early-aughts and published roughly 15 editions, with fiction, poetry, essays and more before transitioning to an exposition production company in 2006. In 2018, with a small, committed core group, we relaunched Bridge as a journal. Our goal is to publish a hardcover guidebook to the interdisciplinary art movement which it seeks to provide, in the tradition of the vanguard pamphlets of previous eras -- from the original Century Guild Hobby Horse of the Pre-Raphaelites to post-Secession journals such as Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book, Tristan Tzara's Litterature magazine & Wyndham Lewis' Blast, to Stieglitz’s Camera Work, Bataille’s Acéphale, Sharp and Béar’s Avalanche, to Ulises Carrión’s Ephemera, and all those in-between. Bridge will be a "periodical," coming out when there's sufficient quality material to merit publication.

Today, Bridge as an artistic collective has expanded to over a dozen active core members, each of whom serve as volunteer section editors for the Bridge Journal in the discipline of their expertise, serve on its committees, publish books, stage exhibitions, expositions, public art and interventions.

The Bridge Journal is print-only when released and also a record, archive and attempt to expand existing public scholarship on current and underrepresented art forms.

This mission extends through the online weekly seasonal Bridge magazine, titles published under Bridge Books and its StepSister Press imprint, our Bridge Video and Audio initiatives, and a planned print magazine for launch in early 2025.

As a programming organization, Bridge has staged dozens of exhibitions, both large and small, nationally and internationally. This has included art incubators such as Bridge 119 Peoria, a former space for collaboration and laboratory to foster “underground” and emerging initiatives, such as art galleries art collectives, spaces and not for profit organizations such as Threewalls, residencies, and other experiments.

As well, Bridge helped define the role of the international contemporary art exposition in the early 2000’s to mid-2010’s, staging dozens of “satellite” expositions alongside main events such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Chicago and the Armory Show in New York, Chicago and Miami, and pioneered first-ever American international expositions alongside Frieze London, and a first American exposition opposite Artforum Berlin as Bridge: Verge 2008. Bridge also presented Verge as the first-ever exposition in Brooklyn during the Armory’s 2011 edition.

Each of these events marked probing artistic experiments into the transformation of public space — and often the transformation of private into public spaces — requiring close work with a variety of public and private interests. These often included city governments, which require extensive permitting and fire code approval for such special uses; individual private real estate owners, and at times involved corporate partnerships including, for example, with L'Oréal’s Shu Uemera, Mexican Tourism, Red Bull, and social-media clients.

Coverage of Bridge events and publications has appeared everywhere, including Artforum, The New York Times, Artnet, The Financial Times, The Huffington Post, The Times of London, Newcity, The Art Newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Art In America, The Chicago Reader, Time Out New York, Chicago and London, The Gawker, ARTINFO, Flavorpill, The Chicago Tribune, WBEZ Chicago, NYFA Current, The Frankfurter Algemeine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice, Monopol, and numerous other news media, art publications and countless blog, podcast and small press publishing outlets throughout the years.

Throughout these decades, Bridge has also served to document these various events, as well as the work of practitioners in an evolving slate of underrepresented art forms, and to caretake their preservation. This includes:

our Readings Archive and series of live readings by poets and writers, now a live reading / recording series and open mic hosted in partnership with Open Books Pilsen.

our Movement Matters archive and performance series investigating work at the intersection of dance, performance, politics, policy and issues related to the body through periodic seasonal symposia series, artist’s roundtables, and performances. and performance / museum studies residencies.

This year we will also launch our Bridge Video online streaming service, Bridge Listening Room and a new annual Bridge Film & Video Festival at SITE/less Chicago in October.

MISSION STATEMENT: "The original goals of Bridge in the late 1990s emerged from the bedrock notion of interdisciplinarity, of a need to recognize interdependence of art across the disciplines, and to think and combine them where appropriate; we feel this concept has further evolved over the decades. The simple belief behind Bridge is that separate fields of inquiry can and should be thought of as having shared, intersectional horizons. Today, every existing worldview, whether scientific, philosophic, aesthetic, political, or literary must acknowledge its limits or risk being defined as obsolete, unachievable, and incoherent."