One day, Brian Willmont decided he wanted to make an art magazine. This, despite the fact that nearly everyone says print is dead. Or that even early-adopter glossies like Fader, Elemental, and Vice are experimenting with digital distribution, making entire issues available online as PDFs. No matter, Willmont, a 23-year-old painter and illustrator figured that assembling a full-color publication of New England–connected visual art with friend Cody Hoyt couldn’t be that hard. “We were like, ‘All kinds of people have magazines every month.’ We can have one. Why not?”
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That was 14 months ago. As it happens, there are plenty of reasons why Willmont and Hoyt shouldn’t have a magazine. For one, they soon discovered that creative kids liked the idea, but didn’t actually plan to contribute. “You would tell someone about the project and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome.’ But people don’t really care about doing things; they just want to hear about them.” He sounds more amused than critical. “If you’ll have a party, they’ll go and drink some beer, but that’s about it.” Further proving Willmont’s point, the student graphic designer who promised to lay out the first issue suddenly vanished, never to return. Plus, the money thing was a formidable problem — they didn’t have any. “In a way, it was really good that we were really naive about the whole thing. I don’t think we would have done any of it if we knew how much work it would be.”
At some point, Willmont’s vision got a name: Apenest, a title that won by popular vote over Bananarexia and Paperabola. “Apenest is like the collective, the nest. It’s not for the singular. It’s for the people,” Willmont notes. Relying on the people was how they financed the project: asking each featured artist to donate a piece that a private art collector would buy for a lump sum, money that would ultimately cover printing costs. In the process, Apenest morphed into a 100-page-plus full-color 8”-x-11” art-book series that sold for $15 each — objets d’art, not disposable objects. “We wanted to make something that would get art into peoples’ houses — and not necessarily next to a toilet on a magazine rack, getting sprinkled on.”
Willmont finds it difficult to identify the criteria, aside from local regionalism, he and Hoyt used to assemble Apenest: Volume One. But, he explains, “We wanted our grandparents to feel comfortable with it, or some art collector, or our 13-year-old younger brother.” So there’s Patrick Casey’s post-Impressionistic portrait of a wild baboon. (Grandparents.) Kevin Cyr’s Koolman, a richly detailed oil painting of an ice-cream truck’s profile; or Suzy Coady’s almost-cartoony portraits of zitty, pug-nosed, mulleted misfits. (Younger brother.) Suzannah Sinclair’s series of post-coital-faced topless beauties sexily lazing about rainbows. (Art collector and younger brother.)
Apenest is one of a few boutique publications that have materialized recently, in spite of the oft-sounded death knell of print. Like Lemon, an elaborately art-directed Boston-based magazine promising “pop-culture with a twist” that launched earlier this year. Or Swindle, the Shepard Fairey–founded magazine whose street-influenced mission states flatly: “Influencing culture is a challenge, but it’s our primary goal.” (Apenest contributor and Somerville resident Caleb Neelon is a Swindle editor.)
