ArtDesk at Art Basel Miami Beach
Something big happened in Florida last December. ArtDesk, the magnificent, mission-driven publication produced quarterly by Oklahoma’s Kirkpatrick Foundation — dreamt up by its chairman, Christian Keesee and helmed by executive director Louisa McCune — was celebrated as among the best in the world, along with six other arts publications, at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Think of Art Basel as akin to the Burning Man Festival, but on steroids, and for the arts. Its largest iteration to date was in December 2022, with 283 galleries represented, along with a dizzying slate of events, performances, satellite fairs, parties and a deeply cool scene. Art Basel Miami Beach is a massive offshoot of an art fair founded in 1970 in Basel, Switzerland. It’s been a driving force — the catalyst, even, of Miami Beach’s incredible art scene since 2002.
The top art galleries in the world occupy reserved spaces within the Miami Beach Conference Center, which they transform into enticing microcosms of their galleries, or expressions of their philosophies. McCune was wowed by the magnitude and spectacle of the thing, including its live performance art. She delights in the telling of it. “At one point there was a woman, an actual live human-being woman, suspended overhead in a chair from this rigging,” she says. This intrepid, nimble woman posed in yoga-like positions, high above the crowd, for the duration of the show.
McCune’s delight continued as she made her way through the space and spotted the work of one of Oklahoma’s most successful artists. “Right there in the primo spot, as you go down the main escalator, is Edgar Heap of Birds, who lives probably two miles from my house here in Oklahoma City … once again, the outsized influence of Oklahomans in the art world, at a national level, was front and center at Art Basel.”
Did McCune do a little happy dance when she finally arrived at Art Basel’s Magazine Collective and saw ArtDesk nestled among such art world and publishing luminaries as The Paris Review, Artforum and WSJ Magazine, plus the six other magazines selected for the Collective? Yes. Yes, she did.
Christian Keesee, Louisa McCune and Larry Keigwin
ArtDesk Issue 01
Funnily enough, when she arrived at the Kirkpatrick Foundation in 2011, McCune thought her magazine days were behind her. She’d been editor-in-chief at Oklahoma Today for 13 years; before that she’d spent her early career in the Big Apple, working for some pretty big dogs in the magazine world: George, Harper’s, New York magazine, Worth and American Benefactor.
Keesee, a visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist, hired McCune in 2011 to serve as executive director for Kirkpatrick Foundation. Founded by Keesee’s grandparents John and Eleanor Kirkpatrick in 1955, the foundation is an Oklahoma City philanthropy supporting arts, culture, education, animal well-being, environmental conservation and historic preservation.
Eighteen months into her tenure at the foundation, in October 2012, McCune was sitting on a picnic bench in Marfa, Texas, wondering just exactly what Keesee wanted to talk with her about. He’d called a couple of weeks prior to say he had a “surprise” and wanted to visit about it in person. Did she need to prepare anything, she asked? No, he assured her.
“It’s Chris, dance choreographer Larry Keigwin and me, sitting on that bench. Chris said, ‘Okay, here it is: I want you to make a magazine.’” His vision was that the magazine would serve as a support publication in some shape or another for three regional art centers: Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center; Green Box Arts Festival in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado; and Marfa Contemporary, which was at the time was Oklahoma Contemporary’s outpost in Marfa, Texas. His other edict? “Make it good. That was my assignment,” she says.
Such a directive might strike fear into the hearts of many, but not McCune. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I know how to do this.’ I’d just come from my career at Oklahoma Today, and various magazines preceding that in New York.” Precisely one year later, ArtDesk debuted with a party at the Hotel Paisano, just a block away from the park bench.
ArtDesk Winter 2023
What started as a glossy, global magazine (ArtDesk was originally sold on newsstands in 25 foreign countries; 10 copies in Japan qualified it as “global”) was over time refined into a luxuriously oversized, interactive, vibrant publication with a targeted distribution and print run of more than 80,000 copies per quarterly issue. It’s inserted in the Sunday New York Times in Oklahoma, Dallas and North Texas, Houston, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and the Colorado Springs area. It’s also distributed for free on racks throughout Oklahoma City.
Most importantly, though, says McCune “About 4,100 copies of ArtDesk go to the middle and senior high school students in Oklahoma City Public Schools.
“It’s written as much for the sophisticated art patron as it is for a 14- or 15-year-old,” she says. “We want to appeal to a large audience of people from all walks of life and all kinds of places.”
For Keesee, McCune and their team, a fundamental premise of ArtDesk is that art is for everyone, and one of the main messages they want to convey is the reality that, although “contemporary art is amplified in art capitals, it is born in regions where many artists are raised and educated.”
Each issue contains a poster — carefully pry the front and back cover from the staples and its interior side is an art poster. McCune imagines young, emerging artists in tiny towns finding inspiration in ArtDesk’s pages, putting the posters on their walls and dreaming. Its coverage is intentionally inclusive, spanning from Ed Ruscha and Jenny Holzer to a local teenager who makes photorealist pencil drawings.
“For me, ArtDesk started as a surprise,” says McCune. “Ten years later, we love the surprise that ArtDesk gives audiences of all ages: inspiration for their own creative lives.”
ArtDesk plans to return to Art Week Miami and Art Basel in 2023, this time to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Visit readartdesk.com.