Letter from the Editor

Introducing Spring/Summer 2026, Volume 1 Issue 1: GROUND

“Art Writing involves relations between people, as discursive. Insofar as it is art, Art Writing can engage public space no longer sustained by ground, including that of truth.”

Ground level is where it all starts. The ground is a surface to build on, and ultimately the substance to which all things return. It is both a literal material (soil, gesso, clay, land) and a conceptual one (foundation, orientation, position, truth). The inaugural issue of this magazine is focused on ground because Art Forearm is itself trying to find its footing, and because I’ve been circling this idea—materially and philosophically—for a little while now.

For years I’ve been involuntarily preoccupied with the idea of grounding and its related concepts: land, place, and site. Maybe it began with working at a botanical garden. Then moving cities and trying to find my place in a new community. After that… habit, maybe? Or just the lovely persistence of curiosity? These themes have surfaced again and again in my projects around site-specificity and land art. So last year I decided to lean into the pull and embarked on a months-long investigation of human intervention in the land—I gave myself the space to dig in, so to speak. It was during this time that the idea for Art Forearm arrived, so it seems right to begin now with ground.

In this era of capitalist imperialism, it is impossible—and irresponsible—not to acknowledge the colonial power dynamics embedded in land. Language and writing play a central role in this. Stories are how power claims territory. Narratives establish ownership, belonging, and authority. As Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said wrote: “Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”

Nation itself, he reminds us, is merely a narration. Writing has been used as a tool of Western domination, but embodiment offers other ways of knowing and remembering that have often been suppressed. The body and the voice can be methods of inscription. Knowledge can be written through movement, rhythm, and ritual as well as through text. It is important to pay attention to who(se body) is speaking. And so this magazine will ask: Where are we writing from? And whose bodies are speaking when we do?

These questions prompt me to think about the evolution of social media—from written language to orality, from pithy status updates on Facebook to daily vlogs on TikTok—and what that shift might signify in a larger cultural sense. So many of us in the US lament that it seems like no one reads anymore. I wonder: if we were to frame this with less cynicism, could we sense a collective desire to break free from the constraints of written language? And if we’re reading less, could it mean we are becoming better listeners?

At Art Forearm, we care deeply about writing, but not only from people who identify as “writers.” You’ll see visual artists, musicians, fabricators, and cultural workers engaging language in ways that alternate between deeply poetic and very matter-of-fact. We want to make space for people to explore their relationship to words in the same way they explore their relationship to other materials. Which is to say: honestly, experimentally, and—this is important—sometimes imperfectly.

This first issue will roll out over the coming months, with posts delivered weekly. Posts will range from practical advice to conceptual reflection, each from a different contributor. You’ll find an essay that considers alien abduction from the edge of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative; a studio profile of a land-based, pedagogical practice; a technical tutorial on how to lay down ground for a uniquely smooth painting surface; and so much more.

Every post is free to read, and if you subscribe, they will arrive directly in your inbox. If you choose to become a paid subscriber, you’ll be helping us work toward paying contributors fairly based on standards established by Working Artists for the Greater Economy.

In a moment when public space feels increasingly unmoored in groundlessness, I’m interested in creating space that is grounded in collective effort. This issue is for and by people who spend their lives making things while reckoning with the contradictions of being human within staggeringly inhumane systems.

I’m glad you’re here with us.

Jennifer Seas
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Art Forearm