Letter From the Editor

When I started Carla in 2015, I imagined these pages as a kind of meeting place, where a community could grow around shared thought—an active site that fostered a participatory exchange. Amidst the uprisings for Black lives, we must acknowledge our responsibility to create a shared discourse that is critical, rigorous, communal, and inclusive. In a recent article, art critic Jessica Lynne called for “writing that seeks accountability,”¹ denoting language as an opportunity for accountable exchange with others—one that invites feedback, adaptation, and debate.

We recently articulated a set of core values as a living document that we will use as our guiding principles at Carla and a road map for how we can better activate such discourse.

We envision an art criticism that is lateral, rather than top-down, and that proposes a wide range of opinion, discourse, and critical thought. Carla values experimental, bold thinking and rejects the notion of criticism as a concrete, final, or immutable authority. Instead, we imagine an art criticism that is constantly evolving and upending itself—allowing itself to expand, ripen, and change. Criticism should be in a vulnerable and constant evolution, rather than static and didactic.

Within our pages, we aim for collectivity and to use our platform to support art writing that fosters what writers Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang refer to as “an engaged citizenry that participates in the making of its own story.”² We want the story we are telling to be one that meaningfully represents our city’s demographic and steps beyond mainstream art conversations. We are actively working to center art writing from (and on artists with) perspectives that have not historically been uplifted—for instance, womxn, BIPOC, non-binary, trans, and queer writers and artists— and recognize the imperative of prioritizing this goal as a primary tenant of our publication.

The art world—much like the infrastructure of our country—has been intentionally designed to privilege a select few through racist, patriarchal, and capitalist structures. We are committed to a politic of antiracism and to publishing critical texts that question the exclusionary practices that exist within our field as we imagine new pathways forward.

We hope to nurture strategies that move our discourse beyond the theoretical and out into the world via public discourse and collective organizing efforts. Carla is committed to a continual and self-reflective evolution as we work to better serve our community as a nexus for cultural discourse.

As one small step to building the kind of platform and publication that we imagine, we are pleased to announce that all forthcoming issues of Carla, will be translated in Spanish. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue to evolve and expand on the initial vision for what this magazine is and can be—we invite you to hold us accountable as we enact these goals and continue our dialogue together.

With gratitude,

Lindsay Preston Zappas

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

1. Jessica Lynne, “Criticism is Not Static: A black feminist perspective,” In Other Words, August 29, 2019, https:// www.artagencypartners.com/hidden-narratives/. 2. Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” The New York Times, July 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/ opinion/we-need-more-critics-of-color.html.

2. Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” The New York Times, July 5, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/ opinion/we-need-more-critics-of-color.html.