In 2005, the artist Daniel "Attaboy" Seifert and his wife Annie Owens were living in Albany, California, and feeling restless. Both were working artists — Seifert had spent years designing toys for companies like Hasbro, Owens had studied film at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco — and they found themselves frustrated by the art magazines they were reading. Everything felt too exclusive, too concerned with credentials and cool. They wanted a publication that would cover the kind of work they actually cared about: pop surrealism, street art, designer toys, lowbrow painting, the whole unruly ecosystem of contemporary visual culture that didn't fit neatly into gallery categories. So they made one themselves.
Hi-Fructose launched as a quarterly print magazine with the subtitle "Under the Counter Culture," and it hit a nerve almost immediately. The first issue featured artists like Gary Baseman, Dave Cooper, and Alex Pardee — names well known in underground art circles but largely ignored by the mainstream press. Within a few years the magazine had built a social media following that now exceeds two million across platforms, and its collected editions have become sought-after books in their own right.
What makes Hi-Fructose endure is its editorial instinct. Seifert and Owens have an uncanny ability to identify artists on the verge of breaking through, and the magazine's coverage has helped launch careers that now span galleries, museums, and public commissions worldwide. A ten-year retrospective exhibition, "Turn the Page," toured major American museums including the Virginia MOCA and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.
Printed on high-quality paper with lavish full-color reproduction, Hi-Fructose remains one of the most beautiful and influential art magazines in the independent publishing world — a testament to what two artists can build when they trust their own taste.
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