For its second issue, apricota is soliciting long- and short-form writing that addresses the theme of CULTS, COMMUNES, and COLLECTIVES.

Cults, communes, and collectives — functional or dysfunctional, extant or defunct — are aggregate bodies formed around central principles or through dynamic leadership. Their organizing structures are often secretive or shielded from the eyes of outsiders. In privacy and isolation, they anchor their members in a common value- or belief-system or particular modes of veneration. These modes may manifest in event-based work that generates a certain amount of participatory zeal, or they can result in objects made through shared action, which remain forever entangled in particular ways of doing. As such, cults and communes can model the practices and social rituals of art, while art collectives can resemble these other forms of communal life, even to the point of becoming indistinguishable from them.

Amid calls for collective action in democratic politics at large, Issue 2 of apricota seeks to examine groups that have pursued more recondite approaches, offering alternatives to mainstream governance and production. We welcome contributions that examine how art, culture, and art history have reckoned with the aberrant or factional, the dissimilar or heteromorphic.

Contributions may consider:
- The relationship of collectives or communes in the history of art to cults or cult practices
- Secrecy and transparency in art collectives
- Art collectives' engagement with sites, objects, and ritual paraphernalia
- Membership and excommunication in the history of art movements, collectives or communal enterprises
- Affective dimensions of cults, communes, and collectives, from ecstasy to shame
- The imbalance or excesses of power within secret societies
- Manifestos or terms of membership


Submissions for consideration by the editorial committee should be emailed to editorsapricota.org by May 12th, 2018.

apricota welcomes both experimental and conventional forms of art and art historical writing. The journal is soliciting contributions in the form of: long-form essays (4,000 – 5,000 words); short-form writing or interviews (750 – 1,500 words); exhibition and book reviews (700 – 1,000 words). All long-form essays will be submitted for peer-review.

All submissions must conform to the style guidelines as outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th or newer edition.

In order to ensure blind readings from the Editorial Committee, authors must remove any identifying information from the content of the submission.

Please submit a separate document with the author's name, title of paper/review, institutional affiliation and email address.


About the Journal
apricota is a journal of modern and contemporary art history published by Secretary Press (New York). apricota, a color on a spectrum, stands in for identities and positions that are no less specific for being intermediary. It asserts a certain decorative queerness, a poetic unorthodoxy, a trace of some luxurious creativity, in excess to all possible ends. Most importantly, it is a title that, in its obliqueness, indicates our interest in slantwise approaches to the writing of art criticism and art history.