Robert Williams had a problem. By the early 1990s, the Albuquerque-born painter — who had been art director for hot-rod legend Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a founding contributor to the underground Zap Comix alongside R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, and the man who had inadvertently coined the term "lowbrow art" with his 1979 book — was getting written up in tattoo magazines, car magazines, biker magazines, and rock and roll magazines. But the art magazines wouldn't touch him. So in 1994, together with Craig Stecyk, Greg Escalante, Eric Swenson, and Fausto Vitello (publisher of Thrasher), Williams founded Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.
The publication's mission was simple: present art that was provocative, technically accomplished, and systematically excluded by the mainstream gallery world. The first issues were distributed through skate shops and independent bookstores, and they sold immediately. Juxtapoz went from quarterly to bimonthly to monthly, becoming the unifying platform for what had been a scattered constellation of satellite movements — street art, pop surrealism, graffiti culture, illustration, tattoo art, skateboard graphics — and drawing them into a single, coherent conversation about what contemporary art could be when it stopped caring about institutional approval.
Over three decades, Juxtapoz has helped launch the careers of artists including Shepard Fairey, KAWS, Mark Ryden, and Camille Rose Garcia. The magazine grew to become one of the highest-circulation art publications in the United States — a remarkable achievement for a title that started as an outlet for work the art establishment actively disdained. Williams, who prefers the term "conceptual realism" for his own work, has watched the culture catch up to what he always knew: that the most interesting art is often made by people who were never invited to the party.
Three decades in, Juxtapoz remains the essential record of art that doesn't ask permission — and the proof that sometimes the best magazines are built by artists who simply got tired of waiting to be covered by someone else.
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