The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant announces a new pamphlet series called Cookie Jar, after Warhol’s lifelong fascination with the object. Marking sixteen years of ongoing support to the field of critical arts writing, Cookie Jar is a platform for new writing by individuals who have previously received an Arts Writers Grant. The inaugural volume of Cookie Jar is called Home is a Foreign Place, after the artist Zarina’s woodcut series of the same name, and
consists of five thread-bound pamphlets, bundled inside a slipcase. With contributions by Ari Larissa Heinrich, M. Neelika Jayawardane, William E. Jones, Tan Lin, and Shaka McGlotten, the essays in Cookie Jar I | Home is a Foreign Place each address home as an unruly site of inheritance, memory, and imagination.

Cookie Jar will be distributed widely and a limited number of copies will be available to order via a new website. Free PDF and epub editions of each pamphlet will is also available for download.

Cookie Jar I | Home is a Foreign Place includes:

1. Ejecta
   Ari Larissa Heinrich
2. ‘This is not the correct history’: Lacunae, Contested Narratives,
   and Evidentiary Images from Sri Lanka’s Civil War
   M. Neelika Jayawardane
3. He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love
   William E. Jones
4. The Fern Rose Bibliography
   Tan Lin
5. Racial Chain of Being: The More Things Change, The More
   Things Change
   Shaka McGlotten

Volume I of Cookie Jar , a pamphlet series of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, gathers five new pieces of writing by grantees that address home as the unruly site of inheritance, memory, and imagination. 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 their books. M. Neelika Jayawardane’s “‘This is not the correct history'” questions the evidentiary nature of documentary photography by foregrounding the slippery ethics of reading images of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war. In “He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love,” William E. Jones spotlights the fascist iconography in the films of Kenneth Anger, revealing unnerving connections to our present political moment. In “Racial Chain of Being,” Shaka McGlotten explores issues of familial legacy, Black radicalism, and the classroom in an update to the chart of representations that provoked Donna Haraway to write “A Cyborg Manifesto” nearly forty years ago.

In describing 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 wood-block print is the first in a portfolio of thirty-six that recall the artist’s childhood residence in Aligarh, India. Even a partial list of the portfolio’s titles—Threshold, Courtyard, Shadows, Fragrance, Despair — invite the viewer into the sensorium of Zarina’s elusive idea of home. The essays in this 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.

—Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha, Editors