Border Crossings Editor Meeka Walsh Concludes 33 Year Tenure

Meeka Walsh will be leaving Border Crossings magazine after 33 years as Editor to pursue a number of independent and personal projects. Under her direction the scope and nature of the Winnipeg-based, interdisciplinary art magazine underwent significant changes, with an increase in the essay form, the expansion of the review section, which became more international, and an enhanced focus on the interview as a forum in which contemporary art could be explored. Throughout, her commitment to the importance of the artist’s voice has been unwavering. She expanded the magazine’s range in issues that measured the direction of practices such as painting, photography, drawing and sculpture with special thematic issues that focused on the intersections between animal and human, on the body, the archive, the monster, on Indigeneity, as well as on art and its ampersands: art & architecture, art & poetics and art & language.

Language, in its clearest and most imaginative expression, has been central to her sense of what criticism could accomplish. Her own voice as a writer was unique. Instead of an editorial, she opened every issue with a section called Bordernotes, where she refined an essay form that is part criticism and part meditation. A selection of 47 of these essays was published by ARP Books in 2022 as Malleable Forms, with an introduction by Barry Schwabsky.

Meeka Walsh’s vision for the magazine extended beyond print; she planned and organized MATTER, a public talk series in which international artists—including Wangechi Mutu, Amy Sillman, Ann Hamilton, David Salle and Gedi Sibony—came to Winnipeg to give a lecture on their artistic practice. Those lectures were always followed by an onstage interview in which audience members were invited to participate, and then the conversation continued at her home. She has consistently viewed the magazine as a bridge between artists, audiences and readers. That role has been enhanced by the acceptance of the full Border Crossings archives at the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, where the content and history of the magazine is being made available to students, academics and the general public.

Meeka Walsh has described her time at the magazine, “As a fortunate life, up-close and engaged with artists and artmakers, however you cast that designation. It’s a great privilege to have been able to contribute to and advance the work and careers of artists, to join the most interesting conversation and to feel a lasting contribution has been made. Next to being with family and beloved large dogs, how could a life be better spent—endless hard work aside.”

Her contribution was summed up by Todd Scarth, Past-Chair and current Member of the Board of Directors: “Meeka Walsh’s editorial vision turned the act of looking into a form of devotion—and Border Crossings into clear evidence that a magazine could be, itself, a work of art. Border Crossings has provided regular proof that rigorous criticism and genuine wonder are not opposed, finding in the margins between disciplines a space where ideas could breathe and surprise themselves. That such a thing existed, and endured, and mattered so far beyond the city in which it took place, is a small miracle, and entirely her doing. There is no one who could have built what she built and no adequate way to discuss what it means.”

Meeka Walsh’s last issue as Editor of Border Crossings, a special on Painting (volume 45, number 1, issue no. 171), will be published in the fall of this year.