Interstitial Art - The Interstitial Arts Movement

The Interstitial Arts Movement

In the mid-1990s, Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Terri Windling, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Midori Snyder, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Gregory Frost, Theodora Goss, Veronica Schanoes, Carolyn Dunn, Colson Whitehead, and other American writers interested in fantastic literature found themselves commiserating over the common perception that the genre-oriented publishing industry found it difficult to market truly innovative fiction involving unusual, fantastical, or cross-genre elements—because the mainstream literary fiction field demanded stories based in realism, while the fantasy field demanded stories that mostly followed the standard conventions of sword and sorcery or high fantasy. Yet it seemed to the authors that some of the best literature was that which didn't quite fit tidily into either category but instead was being discussed in terms of more amorphous, "in-between" descriptors such as "magic realism", "mythic fiction", or "the New Weird". Further, the idea of interstitiality applied to other kinds of "in-between" fiction (unrelated to fantasy) and other "in-between" arts.

Over a period of several years, Kushner and Sherman prompted ongoing discussion about the importance of cultivating artistic "in-betweenness" led to the formulation of the broad concept of interstitial art. In 2002, literary scholar Heinz Insu Fenkl founded ISIS: The Interstitial Studies Institute at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and in 2003–04, Sherman & Kushner and some of their colleagues established the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to developing community and support for artists, arts-industry professionals and audiences whose creative pursuits are interstitial in nature.