Collection: Rosetta Brooks

Rosetta Brooks was a British critic, editor, and curator whose work in the 1980s helped define the critical language through which image culture, appropriation, fashion, and postmodern theory were understood as a connected field. As editor of ZG Magazine — one of the sharpest independent art and culture publications of the decade — she assembled a space where contemporary art, fiction, politics, and media criticism occupied the same printed surface without hierarchy.

Published from London and later New York between 1980 and 1985, ZG moved between J.G. Ballard and Richard Prince, Jean Baudrillard and Nancy Dwyer, Gary Indiana and Peter Halley, treating the period’s image culture as something unstable, political, and highly constructed. Each issue was less a magazine than a temporary exhibition in paper form: a large printed support for the circulation of ideas that had not yet found institutional homes.

The issues gathered here are primary documents of that project — objects that record the editorial intelligence through which 1980s art and theory entered circulation, and that remain among the most significant independent publications of the period.