Over the last 13 years, Sarah Harrelson has been building Cultured Magazine into the kind of new-look, art-focused media company that speaks to the broad tent of today’s art world. Open any one of her oversized issues and you’ll find a magazine from yesteryear, with pages and pages and pages of fashion and luxury ads—Gucci, Hermès, Chanel, Valentino, Saint Laurent, Rolex, Van Cleef, etcetera—before the table of contents. That’s followed by front-of-the-book items, and a feature well using familiar magazine tropes: an annual list of young artists to watch; film or food crossover issues; or a Cult 100 list mixing celebrities (Gwyneth Paltrow, Bowen Yang, Venus Williams, Alicia Keys) with art world luminaries (Tyler Mitchell, Mickalene Thomas, Marc Payot, Jason Farago, Peter Marino) to create a shared but specific sense of glamor that places the art world’s figures at center stage.

Harrelson has captured an audience of 50,000 subscribers the old-fashioned magazine way, by bootstrapping her editorial ideas (and her own money) into a long-standing relationship with advertisers who want to reach the art world’s actual participants. “A lot of those people have been running with me for eight years,” Harrelson told me as we sat down at Sant Ambroeus, in Nolita, to discuss the trajectory of her business. “Hermès, Cartier—I got those accounts when it was me and one other person.”