When the world went into lockdown last year, we had a lot of time on our hands. Many artists took advantage of that time stuck at home to create and relied on the internet more than ever to get their art in front of viewers. One interesting byproduct of this online influx of art was the sudden rise in online “zines.”
Zines are essentially a self-published magazine that showcases, well, whatever the creator wants. These naturally became an online forum for artists to display their quarantine projects.
Now, as restrictions start to lift and people (including artists) are beginning to go back to their in-person lives, the state of zines is under change. As the world has reopened, zine content has slowed. Artists don’t necessarily have the time to maintain their zines while balancing the usual load of life.
However, although quarantine zines may not live on with new content in the future, the impact they’ve had on artists and the viewers that subscribed to their zines could potentially last much longer than quarantine.
Quarantine forced artists to the depths of their creativity. With little to no outside stimuli or inspiration, many were forced to turn to the ideas that seemed too experimental to pursue before or to the art they’d make if no one was watching — because no one was.
Artists felt free to experiment with their craft in zines and take risks, which isn’t as easy to do with a huge publisher or gallery waiting to see it in the ordinary world.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if the level of creative freedom that zines granted continued, even if it exists outside of zines, as the world reopens. In fact, I’d be glad if it did.
As a viewer, I’ve felt a closer connection to the artists I’ve seen through zines. Knowing the art I saw in the last year and a half was the work of someone pushed into a creative corner, with nothing to lose and so much to gain, made me feel like I was experiencing artists with no filter.
They weren’t bound by prompts, themes, guidelines or critics. They were creating candidly to fill their own insatiable need to do so, and that led to such genuine, uninhibited art. It made me feel like I was let into the secret inner thoughts of artists that I was never granted access to before.
So, as trends in art continue to reflect the times, my hope is that if the online zines and the communities of transparent, honest artists they’ve facilitated start to come to a halt, the connections they’ve made between artists and viewers live on.
I hope that artists continue to experiment with their wildest ideas and make the outside world conform to them, not the other way around. I want to see them continue to flirt with the brink of their creative edge and see what comes of it. Put simply, no matter what happens to online zines, I just want artists to keep making art like no one’s watching.
Victor Sledge is an Atlanta-based writer with experience in journalism, academic, creative, and business writing. He has a B.A. in English with a concentration in British/American Cultures and a minor in Journalism from Georgia State University. Victor was an Arts & Living reporter for Georgia State’s newspaper, The Signal, which is the largest university newspaper in Georgia. He spent a year abroad studying English at Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, where he served as an editor for their creative magazine before returning to the U.S. as the Communications Ambassador for Georgia State’s African American Male Initiative. He is now a master’s student in Georgia State’s Africana Studies Program, and his research interest is Black representation in media, particularly for Black Americans and Britons. His undergraduate thesis, Black on Black Representation: How to Represent Black Characters in Media, explores the same topic.