Fragmenting history into a zine for America's 250th
- kevin80158
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Client ArtPhilly
Service
Editorial Design
Print
Publication Design
Need
How do you give a citywide conversation about Philadelphia's past, present, and future a physical form people can hold, take apart, and pass along?
As part of What Now: 2026, ArtPhilly's inaugural, city-wide arts festival marking the nation's 250th anniversary, the What Now Exhibition brought together dozens of Philadelphia artists confronting a single question: what now? ArtPhilly needed a companion publication that could hold all of these artists and their work together, without flattening their individual voices into one tidy narrative. The piece had to feel like part of the exhibition itself, not a program, but an artifact.
Strategy
We designed Prompt(s), a zine built around fragmentation as both form and idea. Rather than presenting the exhibition's artists in a fixed sequence, the zine offers a set of independent elements that can be deconstructed and rearranged, letting each reader assemble their own version of the story. That structure treats chronology not as something prescribed, but as something built from partial, shifting perspectives, echoing how What Now: 2026 itself approached America's 250 years of history.
This fragmentation mirrors how knowledge, history, and memory actually operate: layered, nonlinear, and open to reinterpretation. By inviting readers to reassemble it, Prompt(s) reflects how histories are formed through repetition and reinterpretation, with no single definitive version. We carried that idea into the object itself: pages of the zine unfold out of the publication entirely, opening up into full posters sized to fit a standard IKEA RÖDALM 12" x 16" picture frame, so a reader isn't just deconstructing the zine in their hands, but can pull a piece free, unfold it, and hang it on their wall.
Solution
Prompt(s) gave the What Now Exhibition a publication as layered as the festival it accompanied, a zine that doesn't just document the artists of What Now: 2026, but unfolds, page by page, into artifacts its readers can keep and display long after the festival ends.
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