[the] GFA JOURNAL
About the Journal
Writing is its own form of entry: an entry into accessibility and understanding.
The GFA Journal is where the Grove Foundation for the Arts extends that belief into practice. Committed to expanding access to the arts, GFA stewards its collections to be more than an archive, but a library for investigation. A welcoming portal for creative and critical exploration across genres and timelines.
The GFA Journal is conceived as an evolving site, open to inquiry across collections, contexts, and conversations that have yet to take shape.
That spirit of inquiry carries into this journal, not a static record, but a place where ideas first raised in the foundation's exhibitions continue to be tested, expanded, and reimagined in writing. We publish online, with selected works gathered into an annual print edition
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Current Open Call Theme
The journal begins here with a body of work by Andy Warhol and the questions the collection raises. In pursuit of GFA's commitment to arts education, research, and access, the journal seeks submissions that explode the collection's tenets through generative, speculative discourse, drawing transnationally and transtemporally on the ongoing interplay between identities and geographies, which continues to yield new meaning. Tenets such as gender, identity, materiality, portraiture, the subaltern, semiotics: these are starting points, not boundaries.
We invite writers, scholars, and artist-researchers to bring these ideas into conversation with the Foundation's inaugural exhibition, Warhol: The Dialectical Third — featuring the Ladies and Gentlemen, Sex Parts and Torsos, Querelle, and Self-Portrait series. The GFA Journal is interested in cultivating uncommon rhetorics: writing that finds in Warhol's body of work not conclusions, but new insights, perspectives — and yes, thoughtful questions. Writing that pushes the current consensus and broadens our understanding of Warhol's work.
Open Call
Thematic Prompts
THE DIALECTICAL THIRD: WARHOL, INFLUENCE, AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Warhol’s work has generated an extensive body of scholarship and discourse in the West. Yet his reach beyond the Global North remains largely unexamined.
We are seeking lost narratives, untold stories, artists who have not been named, and underrepresented scholarship around Warhol’s influence in communities and geographies outside the Western canon.
PORTRAITURE AND COLLAPSED TIME
Portraiture is central to Warhol’s practice and the Foundation’s collection. The GFA collection features over 13 portraits from the Ladies and Gentlemen series, as well as Warhol’s own self-portraits — one of the exhibition’s core tenets of investigation.
What does it mean to be truly seen? How does identity survive in art? Who gets to be portrayed, who controls the image, whose likeness is preserved, and whose is erased?
THE POLAROID: ART, ANALOG PRACTICE, AND ARCHIVE
Histories of resistance, intimacy, and testimony can be linked to analog means of art production. The material and its production become revelatory: each medium arrives embedded with a history of the particular culture or community it belongs to. Art has historically engaged with the archive and the political, through film, posters, collage, print, the Polaroid, and other mediums.
Is the Polaroid unique, or will other forms of analog documentation become popular again to assure a sense of historical accuracy? Will institutional archives of the future be mined from the masses, with or without credit? What happens to authorship when AI is built by ingesting other people’s actual labor and intellectual property without permission, without compensation, without citation? With the rapid advancement of digital, is the return to analog also a way of teaching, of passing down to younger generations what it means to make something with the human hand, at human speed, with human judgment?
Submission criteria
Who Should Submit
Writers, scholars, and artist-researchers at all career stages — emerging and established equally welcome. Especially encouraged: voices from communities and geographies outside major metropolitan centers.
We Welcome These Modes of Inquiry
Essays & Criticism — 500–2,500 words
Scholarship & Academic Papers — 500–5,000 words
Fiction — 500–2,500 words
Poetry — up to 5 poems per submission
Hybrid & experimental forms welcome across all categories
Submission Requirements
Original, unpublished work only
Submitters are not limited to one thematic prompt
English language (translations considered with original text included)
Submissions should be legible and double-spaced, 12pt font. Experimental and hybrid formats are welcome
Please include a brief note (50 words) on your formal intentions
Up to 5 images may be submitted to accompany the work. All images must be properly cited and copyright cleared by the submitter. Accepted formats: JPG or PNG. For works under consideration for the print edition, please submit at 300dpi minimum. For online publication, 72dpi minimum is acceptable. If in doubt, submit at the higher resolution.
Short bio, 100 words maximum
A brief note (50 words) on your relationship to the theme and
How to Submit
Submit your work via our online submission form (below) or by email to connect@grovefa.org.
For questions about the submission process, please contact us at the same address.
Timeline
Submissions open: July 01, 2026
Deadline: July 30, 2026
Selected submissions notified: by August 5, 2026
Online publication: released at GFA’s discretion over the following 6 months
Annual print edition: Spring 2027
Selection
10 works selected for online publication
6 works selected for the annual print edition
Selected submitters will be notified within 2 weeks of the submission deadline. Due to the volume of submissions, GFA is unable to respond individually to unsuccessful submissions.
Rights
GFA acquires first publication rights for all accepted works. Upon publication, all rights revert to the contributor. Contributors are free to republish their work elsewhere with the acknowledgment that it was first published in the GFA Journal.
Contributors & Benefits
All 16 selected works will be published on the GFA website and promoted through the foundation’s newsletter and Instagram. Contributors whose work appears in the annual print edition will receive 3 contributor copies.
Selected contributors may also be invited to participate in future GFA programming, including live activations, talks, and discussions connected to the foundation’s exhibitions and events