note from the editor
hi. it’s march, which means the beginning of our regular content schedule. before that, i wanted to take a moment to say a few things. namely, that i am very nervous. and that the process leading to this launch has been one full of lessons, growth, and change.
one: learning about your own editorial style is interesting / challenging!
there are some things i feel pretty flexible and open about: deadlines, being a conversational and relatively hands off editor when it comes to stylistic, grammatical, and structural differences in viewpoints, etc.
but i’ve realized already through this process that there are things that i am mostly uncompromising about. namely: identity politics.
the goal of New Archives is to introduce a kind of arts writing that we don’t see enough – for me, that means writing that, if it is critical of the way a marginalized artist addresses their identity, it will also acknowledge the writer’s potential misreading of the work due to a lack of lived and cultural knowledge.
this is such a common, perpetual, and systemic issue. one only need to read about what happened with simone leigh’s work at the 2019 Whitney Biennial to realize that artists of marginalized identity, no matter how rigorous or airtight their own analysis and research, or how traditionally successful their careers, struggle to escape reviews that reify how hegemonic cultural structures determine ideas of value and ‘quality’ in the arts.
in contrast, i am interested in writing that approaches rigor and criticality through a lens of generosity and self–fallibility. as Parul Sehgal said, “I think about the critics that I love – Sontag, Barthes – who contradict themselves constantly, consistently, as an ethic in their work.”
i’m still struggling with what this looks like and how to bring writers with differing viewpoints into New Archives in a productive way, but in the meantime, it feels like a value i cannot compromise due to a commitment to the most marginalized and easily dismissed folks in our community.
until i get better at this, i appreciate your patience and love. talk soon.