Expand your mind with a new magazine of psychedelic art and literature.
Are you ready to take a trip?
Elastic, a biannual print magazine of psychedelic art and literature that will debut in spring 2025, aims to publish art and writing that’s “immersive, dreamlike, daring, genre- and time-bending, and that acts to expand the mind and the vast possibilities of narrative.”
Founding editor-in-chief Hillary Brenhouse was previously the editorial director of Bold Type Books and editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine. She’ll be joined by editor Meara Sharma, formerly the editor-in-chief of Adi magazine, and a body of contributing editors and artists that includes Jaquira Diaz, Amanda Gunn, Laura van den Berg, Jia Sung, Amber Sparks, and Darian Longmire. The magazine is being supported in part by grants from UC Berkeley and Harvard as part of their Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.
“The first psychedelic era was a time of radical artistic innovation,” Brenhouse says. “And yet, in the popular imagination, ‘psychedelia’ refers to little more than neon mandalas and jam-band music. Elastic is interested in work that locates the sublime in the ordinary, that interrogates power by breaking form, and that extends the boundaries of the usual creative containers. We’re also interested in countering the prevalent idea that the only authors of psychedelic culture have been the same few white men.”
In addition to publishing contemporary work, the magazine will pay tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic art and literature, much of which was made by Black artists and thinkers, as cultural critic Emily Lordi points out in “The Radical Experimentation of Black Psychedelia.” Elastic seeks to recognize and revisit the artists at the leading edge of, in Lordi’s words, “one of the most lasting and influential artistic movements of the twentieth century.”
It all sounds trippy and terrific; I can’t wait for the first issue.
