Hauser & Wirth is launching yet another new venture: a quarterly art magazine called Ursula, in honor of gallery co-founder Ursula Hauser.

Journalist and novelist Randy Kennedy, who joined the gallery last year as director of special projects after 23 years at the New York Times, is executive editor of Ursula, which debuts in December with contributions by Luc Sante, Robin Coste Lewis, Alissa Bennett, and Pipilotti Rist (on her recipe for Japanese pickles). The managing editor is Catherine Davis, who previously held that role at Interview and Spin magazines. The graphic studio Common Name designed the magazine.

“There has been a lot of thinking about how to make this look right and feel right,” Kennedy told artnet News. “It will be about art that’s being made by the gallery’s artists and art that’s coming out of estates, but it will also feature a lot of writing about living artists, historical work, and dispatches from the worlds of literature, design, architecture, food, and books.” But all the content will be “at least tangentially” related to art, he says.

Randy Kennedy. © Patrick McMullan. Photo by Patrick McMullan.

Kennedy’s had a long affinity for print magazines. He subscribed to Harper’s while growing up in a small town in West Texas and became particularly fond of a little known hardcover arts magazine called Horizon, which was published between the 1950s and the 1980s. That magazine, which featured writers such as John Ashbery, W.H. Auden, Nancy Mitford, and Frank O’Hara, was an inspiration for Ursula, Kennedy says.

“While some writers had a real connection to the art world, others didn’t but would take on a subject for a profile, or they would write an essay,” he says. “That’s the spirit that I want to do this in. I’m really trying to commission writers who don’t normally write about art or don’t write about it that often but who may have a real affinity for a certain work or period or who who have a great idea for an essay.”

The magazine’s logo. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Ursula will be distributed internationally on newsstands, major bookstore chains in the US and UK, as well as at several Hauser & Wirth galleries and some museum stores.

“It has always been our mission to make the gallery a home for our artists where other thinkers, writers, and visionaries can also gather and engage,” gallery president Iwan Wirth told artnet News in an email. “Now Ursula will be an editorial home as well, a truly global magazine that reflects our philosophy.”