The Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Grant is launching a new pamphlet series, Cookie Jar, titled after Warhol’s lifelong fascination with the object—at his death, he owned about 175, sourced from flea markets, thrift stores, and estate sales—and marking sixteen years of ongoing support for critical arts writing. Edited by Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha, Cookie Jar will feature new writing by former grantees and will be available through regular distribution channels and through the foundation’s website; additionally, epub and pdf versions will be made available as free downloads.
The debut volume is titled Home is a Foreign Place, after the artist Zarina’s 1999 woodcut series of the same name themed around her childhood home in Aligarh, India. Comprising five thread-bound pamphlets bundled inside a slipcase. It will present essays by Ari Larissa Heinrich, M. Neelika Jayawardane, William E. Jones, Tan Lin, and Shaka McGlotten, all addressing “home as an unruly site of inheritance, memory, and imagination,” according to a foundation press release. Heinrich’s “Ejecta” takes as its subject Jes Fan’s melanin sculptures and the geology of metaphoric language, while Lin’s “The Fern Rose Bibliography” finds the poet memorializng his late parents through an olfactory exploration of their books. Centering images of the long-running Sri Lankan civil war, Jayawardane in “This is not the correct history” queries the evidentiary nature of documentary photography, while Jones connects fascist iconography in the films of Kenneth Anger to our present moment, in an essay titled “He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love.” McGlotten in “Racial Chain of Being” places issues of familial legacy, Black radicalism, and the classroom in the context of chart of representations that inspired Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto.
“The essays in this volume of Cookie Jar, varied in scope and approach, illuminate the interior landscapes associated with home,” wrote Dalal and Kotecha. “Collectively, they demonstrate the fearlessness—and the tenderness—with which writing may yet encounter art.” No publication schedule has yet been issued; the first volume will be available November 15.