Letter from the Editors
Dear Dirt Readers,
After nearly a year, we’re ready to reintroduce ourselves. Over these many months, we took a deep and honest look at our goals, our desires as a collective, and reaffirmed what brings us joy. As with any collective or collaborative work, it’s critical to check in once in a while, to listen intentionally, and to solidify our commitment to one another. As an independent publication, we took advantage of our autonomy and hit pause, took a break, and reshaped our mission for the future.
In the service of sustainability and a healthy working relationship, we hosted our first-ever Dirt retreat — bringing together all seven of our editors to meet IRL in DC for a weekend in January. Our goals were to strengthen our collective bond, critique our work styles & operations, and to build/rebuild systems and organizational philosophies, ultimately seeking to better understand how we could welcome change moving forward. As always, we think being transparent about our vulnerability is essential and we are excited to share more about this process with all of you in going forward.
With this re-launch, we hope to push the limits of conventional arts and culture writing, discovering new methods of building and sustaining community, which sometimes means breaking the rules. With this in mind, we have established a new, firm set of values for Dirt and the work we produce.
Dirt prioritizes underrepresented artists, organizers, communities, histories, stories, and archives.
Dirt is a space for experimentation and exploration; success and failure.
Dirt is committed to the advocacy and practice of fair compensation and equitable labor.
Dirt centers collaboration, radical generosity, and honest criticality.
Dirt believes that artists and art are integral to the evolution of culture and society — the artist as a whole and not just their artworks.
Dirt is fertile, porous, fluid, and generous. We’re more than a publication: we are a platform, a project, and a collective that examines, surveys, and archives the art and culture in and around us.
We need you (our readers) to pitch your wildest ideas to us! We are thirsty for critical writing from unique voices, but also very interested in working within experimental formats. We want more disruptive, unexpected content — more zines, more IRL gatherings.
Dirt is alive and ready for your ideas. This time around we’ve expanded our content — that means writing from different places and spaces. We will continue to strive to push the boundaries and possibilities of what arts writing could and should look like. That includes sometimes failing, sometimes not getting it right, and sometimes stumbling. We invite you to join us on this journey as we navigate our own little corners of the world.
XO,
(Ani, Andy, Georgie, Ikram, Jordan, Martina & Val)