Letter from the Editors: Art and Art-Adjacent
When Monika asked me to write a letter from the editor before officially joining the Review as its new editor of art writing, I sent her an email saying, “One last question, why’d you call the magazine Triangle House?” She wrote back, “Ha! It’s just my ideal of home.”
When you make the decision to put in the necessary work to keep a magazine in line with your taste and aspirations, what better thing to name it after than your ideal space? Over the summer, I emailed Monika, Bryan, and Becca, asking about including what I called “art and art-adjacent writing” in the magazine. (My ideal home is full of it, I would’ve told them had I known the impetus behind the name at that point.) And so I’m thrilled to announce that they said yes, that we’ve begun taking submissions for art-related writing, and that you can send them to me now at wally@triangle.house. We’ll begin publishing them in the fall.
In Triangle House’s most recent letter from the editor, one written on the occasion of the magazine’s first year coming to an end, Becca wrote, “The relevancy or lack thereof of art in the face of disaster is a perennial question . . .” And here we are now, the aforementioned disaster has only worsened, and we, as writers and editors and makers of all kinds, are building this journal—a home, our ideal home. I believe in the necessity of mourning, and of action, but I also believe in the necessity of art. The home we’re building might be in a fucked up country led by fucked up people at a fucked up point in history, but I’ll be damned if we don’t hang some great art on the walls.
This issue, Triangle House’s sixteenth, is an especially exciting one for me to come on board with. One must only squint slightly to see how so much of this could be read through the lens of art writing. Allison Conner’s impressively deep dive into the writing of Cristina Rivera Garza gives as much weight to Rivera Garza’s text as it does to recurring shapes and visual phenomena. Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton’s conversation breaks into a thoughtful, four-dimensional project that the two of them constructed together on google docs, then dips into the world of ekphrasis when Elissa says, “I’d say this essay is an example of coiling, the basket construction approach that results in apparent seamlessness and a tightness that can allow the basket to even hold water.” Jo Barchi’s fierce epistolary piece uses anaphora to charge down a mountain at the reader, giving us only the most necessary information. Aatif Rashid’s heartfelt story exists in the visual world, detailing how it shapes our identity. And Anton Ivanov’s poems, too, stand like whispers or photographs in a vacuum, relating to the world like art objects.
So please, send your writings concerned with art and art-adjacent topics to wally@triangle.house. Send your reviews and your art criticism, and also send your meandering thoughts, your brush-ups with art, or an idea about a connective thread between artworks that you’ve grown obsessed with. Tell me what you saw that you can’t stop thinking about. Pitch interviews and studio visits, or write about what was hanging in your grandparent’s house. I look forward to reading your submissions.
Warmly,
Wallace Ludel & the editors
