The GFA Approach

By Dina Giordano

The written art form didn't grab me right away. It took time for the subject matter to meet my curiosity. I was in middle school, seventh grade precisely, when I was transformed by it. It was a creative writing class where we interpreted song lyrics and analyzed poems. I remember a passage of prose that churned a smile of delight on my face with its delicately worded lines and wit. I was taunted by its nuances that made the content sparkle with a new brilliance. It's this nourishment in words and writing that one begins to crave. Knowing that words could be artfully strung together to sing the unsung songs, portray deep sorrows or the hunger for belonging. Literature's power connects us to our humanity. It is in these moments the artist in the writer is revealed.

The written word laid brick by brick, laboring as an artist, each writer in their own style, each building rooms: whether those are clean modern spaces without clutter, where words land so directly with purpose, where the orthogonal language compresses the reader's path to understanding. Or those writers who build rooms with a baroque tongue. With lingering phrasing, that wander in your imagination with a trifle of ifs and how comes.

Language expands and limits us in equal measure. Words, signs, and symbols construct a society and define a culture. With these elements, there is an alchemical attempt to understand, express, and ultimately connect to one another. For example, Tagalog doesn't have separate pronouns for he and she. Romance languages bask in their patriarchal structures. And in Portuguese, there is one word, saudade, for the sense of longing that's so deep you can feel it in your body. We gain new knowledge, something that was left out of the history books, by expanding the voices who help us understand the impact of the arts and their lived experiences. By casting a wider net, we gather a written compendium and begin to deepen our collective understanding. It's through multiplicity that we acquire insight.

In [the] GFA JOURNAL, writing is another point of access into the private collections the foundation works with. It brings audiences and viewers into the work through diverse writing styles and a broad set of voices: from contributing writers, the collaborative insight of interviews, and daily discoveries, our own field notes on culture, art, and the collection, shared regularly.

The task of writing about art is intractable: the investigation into the connections to society, culture, human experience, artist whims, inklings, desires. May we go softly and purposefully, irreverent to the mythologizing bent of the moment. Attempting to produce something original is hard; in today's age, it is difficult to avoid being derivative. Still, the hope is that the journal hits, plangent, to the soul and intellect.

We don't come from the same head as everyone else. Our approach is our own. We aim not to define or dictate, but to unlearn and relearn what has been deemed knowledge, to write and rewrite what has been recorded. The undoing and the redoing is a practice meant to bring, by greater wisdom, a shared knowing, rather than hopscotching the truth to fit the preferred story.

This first online release, 01.A, begins that work. It takes our founding exhibition of the Warhol collection as its anchor, carrying those themes forward. In conversation: curator Tarisse Iriarte, a curatorial activist focused on the Global South. In Daily Discoveries: George Platt Lynes, a new addition to the collection; Isaac Julien, whose wrestlers lead back to Warhol's own; "Storm," directed by Romain Gavras, which grapples with masculine identity; and Kandy G. Lopez, who weaves portraits of her community in fiber and yarn. And our first contributing essay, James Lewis Tucker's "An Unexpected Flash," on a friend's Polaroid notebook and the spark between artist and tool.

We are here now to invite you to wander joyfully into the lyrical rooms of writers, to build on your knowledge with bricks of discovery, and to listen to the unsung songs of all peoples.