Tayari's Blog: Art Is Everywhere
Posted by TayariJones on September 5, 2008 08:05 PM
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Guest Bloggers
Tayari Jones: Kendrick, I just took a look at Issue 5. What a fantastic accomplishment. I looks great and there's a lot 
of substance to go with the eye-popping layout. Tell me, how did you start Art Nouveau and what motivated you? How did you pull it off? Did you get a grant or something?
Kendrick Daye: First off, Thanks for the compliments. We really worked extremely hard to make this the best issue we could. We wanted the layout and photos and graphics to be out there but we also wanted to cover topics and issues that more mainstream magazines don't. Me and stylist Phillip Holmes started it back in the Fall of 07. We were sitting in my room one day and out of nowhere I just blurted out let's start a magazine. And he was excited, I was excited and we planned and planned all that night. I'm a graphic designer also, so I was designing the site and the graphics and we just went ahead and did and promoted the hell out of it on MySpace and Facebook and it just bloomed and kept going. We didn't get any grant or any monetary assitance, lol. We paid for everything ourselves.
Tayari: When you say your room, do you mean you DORM room? How old are you anyway?
Kendrick: Well I was in college when I started it, but I haven't lived on campus since Freshman year. My room in my apartment in downtown Atlanta. I'm 21 and graduate from Morehouse this July.
Conrats in advance on your graduation. Until you mentioned your "room" I had forgotten that you are a college student, because the magazine doesn't seem like an undergraduate experiment. So that said, how did you get so many A-list people to give you interviews? Which of the big fish was hardest to net?
Kendrick: Thanks. We wanted to be above all taken seriously. We never wanted it to be known as a college magazine. We wanted it to be more than that. As far as the A-List interviews that we got they were simple. We just asked around. I already had the know how amd connects with big publicity firms because I was the arts editor for The Maroon Tiger, the student newspaper of Morehouse College. We had trobule getting a couple of people. We've reached out to The Clipse numerous times. It was extremely hard to get Talib Kweli, we were biting our nails hoping on that one. Someone I want to try to interview is Solange Knowles. I like this new avant-garde 
approach she has to her music and want to have a conversation about the music industry with her.
Tayari: I love the way you spun your college newspaper connections into big time publicity connections. (And your photography is terrific, too.) I'm a writer and this is a literary blog, so what's the best anecdote you can tell us about the writers interviewed in the magazine?
Kendrick: Ah, the writers. I'm an English major so clearly I wanted to have strong literature section that highlights literature we love, literature I love--like Amy Hempel, Matt Johnson, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Raymond Carver and other writers we admire like you Tayari. The best anecdote about the writers interviewed in the literature section? I don't know. The Tao Lin interview was supposed to be through Gmail chat, but I can't remember what stopped us from doing that. We tried and will continue to try to get an interview with Amy Hempel. I love her work and just want to learn from her as much as I can. Really that's how a lot of it starts. Just wanting to know a question and finding out the answer.
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