It is with much shock and sadness that I learned a few days ago that Russ Kick (1969 – 2021) had passed away. Russ was a FOIA champion and government transparency activist among his many other talents. While I didn’t know him personally, I had on occasion emailed with him and worked with groups working on FOIA and records schedule issues that included him (he was dogged in tracking and pursuing records destruction requests from federal agencies!) I frequently mined his altgov2 site and the memory hole before that looking for FOIA’d government documents to save in our digital repository and catalog for wider access. Needless to say — though he probably didn’t know it — Russ had a HUGE impact on me, on government information libraries, and on FOIA and the public’s right to know about the workings of their government. Please check out Seven Stories Press and Washington Post for more official obituaries.
- Remembering Russ Kick (1969 – 2021) by Seven Stories Press
- Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52. Harrison Smith, Washington Post, September 26, 2021.
Molly Crabapple, comics artist and colleague of Russ Kick, put Russ’ impact on the world into unique perspective:
I first found Russ Kick when I was thirteen, through his book Outposts. For a friendless goth kid like me, Kick was the exact sort of guide I needed. Like a punk-rock Virgil, Russ’s work led countless young people like me to the exact sort of places that America tried to hide—to the dangerous, thrilling, strange, ludicrous and beautiful realms where we imagined we could belong. I was an immediate devotee; his formative bad influence helped shape my own artistic path. With his Disinformation series, Russ challenged power. He peeled the censored bars off of redacted documents, and kicked down the doors of the pompous and mendacious, to reveal their skulduggery to the world. His work was transgressive, subversive, and irreverent of piety—all qualities in short supply today. Russ Kick showed the possibilities of life. Many years later, I was lucky enough to have Russ as an editor on The Graphic Canon. Never meet your idols, they say, particularly the ones of the gonzo variety, but in Russ’s case, this would have been bad advice. He was unfailingly kind, supportive, generous and perceptive. I cannot fathom the loss of such a man, but the world is made more narrow by his absence.
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