Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, gathers five new pieces of writing by grantees that take on home as an unruly site of inheritance, memory, and imagination. 

Cookie Jar is free to read in all formats. Scroll down for information on how to order your limited print copy of Cookie Jar 1, as well links to download each essay in PDF/ePub formats. 

In “Ejecta,” Ari Larissa Heinrich reflects on artist Jes Fan’s melanin sculptures and the geology of metaphoric language. Tan Lin’s “The Fern Rose Bibliography” is a meditation on the loss of his parents through an olfactory exploration of his family’s books. M. Neelika Jayawardane’s “‘This is not the correct history’” questions the evidentiary nature of documentary photography foregrounding the slippery ethics of reading images of the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. In “He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love,” William E. Jones closely reads the fascist iconography in the films of Kenneth Anger for their prescient, unnerving connections to our contemporary political moment. In “Racial Chain of Being,” Shaka McGlotten updates the chart of representations that was Donna Haraway’s provocation in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in the process forging connections between familial legacy, Black radicalism, and the classroom. 

In her masterwork Home is a Foreign Place (1999)—from which we borrow the title and cover image for this volume—the artist Zarina wrote, “The titles of my work always come to me before the image. Language ties my work together. Urdu is home.” Titled Home, this is the first of thirty-six woodblock prints that recall the artist’s childhood residence in Aligarh, India. Even a partial list of Zarina’s titles—Threshold, Courtyard, Shadows, Fragrance, Despair—reveal how the viewer is invited into the sensorium of Zarina’s elusive idea of home. 

The essays in this first volume of Cookie Jar, varied in scope and approach, illuminate the interior landscapes associated with home. Collectively, they demonstrate the fearlessness—and the tenderness—with which writing may yet encounter art.

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For questions regarding Cookie Jar please email us at: cookiejar[at]artswriters.org

For more information about The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant please visit our website.

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