Art Metropole is a gallery, archive, and distributor of contemporary art in multiple format: artists books, multiples, video, audio, electronic media, etc. It was founded in Toronto in 1974 by the art group General Idea. Go spend some time looking around their site. They sell anything and everything from a $14,000 Raymond Pettibon zine set (I wonder how much my one Pettibon zine is worth... too bad I'll never sell!) to $2 postcards from gallery shows. Their periodicals section is also wicked impressive and carries issues of General Idea's own magazine FILE from the '70s as well as new issues of mags like Girls Like Us and The Wire.

Aside from selling and archiving stuff, Art Metropole also curates shows and events. Right now they have a print-media project called Advertising By Artists where four artists make advertisements for Art Metropole in five different publications over the course of fifteen months. Cecilia Berkovic, Stephen Ellwood, Nestor Kruger and Yoko Ono are making ads for Border Crossings, Butt, Cabinet, They Shoot Homos Don't They and The Wire. Pictured above is Stephen Ellwood's ad for Butt.

You can search the entire Art Metropole Collection here. And the National Gallery of Canada has a PDF of the history of Art Metropole and its events for download here.

During Butt Magazine's early years they had a companion zine, a sisterly counterpart, called Kutt. It was started by their friend Jessica Gysel. She put out a few issues of Kutt and then seemed to disappear, only to resurface a few years later with the fantastic Girls Like Us magazine. Ultimately, Girls Like Us is the better mag--more fully realized, existing on its own rather than as a version of Butt, etc. Regardless, the issues of Kutt are still totally good, if you can find them... I had been looking for ages before I finally found a single copy of issue #3 at St. Marks Books.