ART-RITE — NO. 13 BY ALAN SUICIDE (ALAN VEGA)

Publisher: Art-Rite Publishing Co., 149 Wooster Street, New York
Year: January 1977
Issue: No. 13 — Alan Suicide (Alan Vega)
Dimensions: 26.6 × 20.3 cm
Language: English
Format: Softcover, thin paper stock
Pages: 22
Condition: Fine — exceptionally well preserved, with no visible imperfections or signs of wear. A remarkably clean copy, preserved in near-original condition.

Art-Rite was the downtown New York art magazine of the 1970s that regularly handed entire issues over to individual artists, allowing them to turn the publication itself into an extension of their practice. No. 13, published in January 1977, belongs to Alan Suicide — Alan Vega, the singer and visual artist best known as one half of the proto-punk duo Suicide.

Rather than functioning as a conventional art magazine, Vega’s issue reads as a deliberately chaotic portrait of the “underculture.” The cover features jockey Jorge Velasquez, while the interior brings together Iggy Pop, Ghost Rider, Willy DeVille of Mink DeVille photographed by Curtis Knapp, a photograph by Donald Greenhaus, and a painting by Joseph Catuccio.

The issue moves freely between horse racing, rock and roll, pornography, motorcycles, physical culture, street imagery, and the darker edges of American popular culture. Its stated dedication to “the average American searching for excitement” captures the deliberately confrontational attitude of the publication and Vega’s own visual world.

Printed on extremely thin, newsprint-weight paper, the issue was produced at the intersection of the downtown art world and the emerging CBGB-era music scene. Its physical fragility, limited circulation, and highly specific authorship make surviving copies particularly difficult to find in exceptional condition.

No. 13 is an especially rare issue of Art-Rite because it is not simply an issue featuring Alan Vega—it is an entire publication shaped around Vega’s own visual universe at a crucial moment in New York’s cultural history. Published in January 1977, just as Suicide was becoming increasingly influential within the downtown scene, it documents the point where the SoHo art world, punk, experimental music, and the underground press were still operating within the same small network.

Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, the issue stands as a primary document of the period when New York’s art and music underground began to collapse into one another. This copy is particularly desirable for its exceptionally clean condition, with no visible imperfections despite the inherently fragile paper stock.