Following its twelve-year history as a digital nomad whose mission is to provide equitable media representation for women and non-binary contemporary artists, Topical Cream is thrilled to announce its inaugural print issue! This issue, curated by 2025 Editor-in-Residence Lumi Tan, will launch at Artists Space on November 19th in New York and will also be included in Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong.

This extraordinary two-cover issue features performance artist (NEA Four) Karen Finley in Women’s History Museum, with the second cover featuring Lumi herself holding a Topical Cream zine featuring 2024 Editor-in-Residence Ebony L. Haynes. The 144-page, full-color magazine marks a milestone for the organization and includes TC archival features and programmatic content.

“Every page of this issue is a testament to the fact that what we created is now a critical space where there was once a glaring void,” says founder and director Lyndsy Welgos.

Founded in New York in 2013, Topical Cream is a pioneering arts organization dedicated to providing equitable media representation for women and non-binary contemporary artists. Originally launched as an online magazine challenging art media’s long history of problematic portrayals of female-identifying artists, it has since grown into an internationally recognized organization offering art criticism, a residency program, youth initiatives, public programming, and mentorship.

For this issue, Lumi Tan brings together ten critical essays, exhibition reviews, and artist interviews that draw on the conceptual underpinnings of performance and time-based art to ask what it means to find comfort in the pleasures of cadence and digression in a time of polycrisis.

“Rarely are we given the grace to unfold in real time, to appear in an unfixed position,” says Tan. “When you take too long, you are often criticized for thinking through the revolution instead of acting through it. These writers and artists dismiss such an either/or and reflect how history is not written by us but continually enacted through us.”

To celebrate the launch of the print issue, Tan will join ten of the artists and writers featured in the magazine in conversation and performance at Artists Space on November 19th.

The issue includes contributing writers Kathy Cho, Tess Edmonson, Mariana Fernández, Alessandra Gómez, May Makki, Seta Morton, Madeleine Seidel, Diana SeoHyung, Allie Tepper, and Wendy Vogel.

Featured artists include Indira Allegra, Leo Amino, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Whitney Claflin, Women’s History Museum, Zorica Čolić, Blondell Cummings, Pan Daijing, Olivia Drusin, Leandra Espírito Santo, Karen Finley, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Eva Hesse, Cindy Hill, Deborah-Joyce Holman, Amando Houser, Juliana Huxtable, Rosalie Smith, Tao Siqi, quori theodor, and Jack Whitten.

Special Thanks to Our Advertising Partners: Baggu, Lipman Studio, Cameron Williams, Greene Naftali, MoMA PS1, Art Basel Miami Beach, Antenna Space, The Kitchen, 52 Walker, Swiss Institute, Greene Naftali, 56 Henry, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Artists Space, Thomas Schulte, Hi Bridge Books, Artists & Mothers, Asakura Stolbun, Sebastian Gladstone, Digital Counsel, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, Hauser & Wirth, KAJE, Gogo Graham, and Sandy Liang.