Carla is an acronym for Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. These five words plainly spell out the magazine’s focus, but the name Carla is a bit more oblique. When founding the magazine, Lindsay Preston Zappas liked the familial quality of the name Carla, and also that, as a female-owned and founded publication, its name would carry a subtly-gendered bent.

When the former app, and now newsletter, for discovering things to do in L.A., 5 Every Day featured Carla launch parties and events, they often referred to Carla as “the gently-gendered acronym.” The phrase stuck with us, and we decided (with 5 Every Day’s blessing) to immortalize it on a T-shirt.

Printed in Los Angeles, California on upcycled “imperfects”—EVERYBODY.WORLD tees that have subtle imperfections (very small pinholes or other slight imperfections) that prevent the items from being sold in traditional retail. By upcycling them for this tee, we are participating in their mission to reduce waste. Your tee may include a small imperfection.

Edition of 75 unique T-shirts printed on custom-dyed, 100% recycled cotton.

Designed by Benjamin Critton

Launched at Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair 2021

Limited run of 100 Carla bandanas.

100% cotton.

“To lean into the spill, to step outside of dominant structures, we must trust that another world is possible. …Here, the idea of the spill becomes revolutionary—the spill is a refusal to conform, a denial of rigid systems, and a pathway into another mode of being.”

–Lindsay Preston Zappas
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This issue features writing on artists Clifford Prince King, Shikeith, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Andrea Bowers, Amia Yokoyama,Kaari Upson, Nadia Lee Cohen, Wendy Park, Paul McCarthy, Kelly Akashi, and more.

The artists featured in this issue form a particular kind of river—one that celebrates building individual agency through channels of collective support and discourse (L. Frank talks about “holding hands through time”). Lineage and histories of thought flow to support these artists’ work of anatomizing dogmatic and limiting narratives, reinventing structures in the process—pushing always toward something new.

Lindsay Preston Zappas
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This issue features writing on artists Raul Guerrero, Nao Bustamante, L. Frank, Kenneth Tam, Aria Dean, and more.

Read the Digital Issue Here

Despite all of the collective organizing ahead of the election, while we waited, I felt a lack of power, a sense of reliance on the hegemonic forces at work to determine our fate…Yet, I was also reminded of the power of community—the power of collectivity, and of organizing.

… In this issue, Catherine Wagley writes, “I want to live in a different, more liberated world than the one most of us find ourselves caught in, and I want art to help me find it, even as art worlds themselves have again and again proven to be fully committed to a hierarchical, confining, and capitalist reality.” Of course, art itself can provide a pathway towards a more connective world. It’s this very possibility that keeps us all here—the notion that we can collectively and creatively push for the futures that we desire.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas
Carla Founder & Editor-in-Chief

When we speak about art, we often verbally partition off our field: we say art world, art scene, art community. Each of these words carry different meanings and connotations. World implies an independent entity that functions according to its own ecosystem. Scene conjures Artforum’s “Scene and Herd”—defining our cohort via parties, shoes, or hairstyles. The latter distinction though, community, has a more robust association, conjuring collective motivation and cooperation. 

Across this issue, community is explored in its various guises—communes, utopias, cults, genres. I wonder how we might, in the L.A. art community, work together to strive for more familial conversations and interactions in order to better offer communal support to one another.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This issue, we feature artists who are bridge builders: between genres; between political vantage points; between modes of representation. In the midst of a political system that increasingly mirrors reality television, striving towards bridge building is a productive way forward, even if it is not always clean, understandable, or even successful.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

The art world has always existed in its own rarefied feedback loop, but within art discourse, it seems trends towards specific segmentation are all the rage: women, people of color, and even those with specific sexual preferences are being corralled and shown together….Here, in our 10th Carla, we ceremoniously provide a big ‘ol issue, chock-a-block full of words by writers each navigating our contemporary moment of hyper-specialization.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

By communing with our opposites, there is potential for a richer and more full understanding of ourselves. Yet, we are often instead reactionary; the schism between various social groups widens.

This issue of Carla proposes several dialogues around art practices that may on first glance be seen as participating in these types of reactionary gender divisions. But, a closer look into these disparate artists and practitioners—who dissect systems of power and gender inequalities head on—reveals that they are in fact in search of a deeper understanding, not an inquisition.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Criticism is a prickly thing. Negative opinions are often perceived as unruly, threatening to disturb the consistency of an editorial enterprise. But, they are also intellectually, creatively, and ethically essential. Criticism can’t want to be easy; or it risks making even the best art so…I hope to sidestep these musty qualifiers (positive/negative) ascribed to criticism, and the precarity of the critic’s role, by simply being honest.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Designed by Maria Guzmán Capron, the Wiggle Tee echoes Maria's use of intertwining figures in her fiber-based and drawing practices. These figurative works explore cultural hybridity and a nonbinary sense of self. The tee is a celebration of the influences that shape us and a multivalent sense of self and the body—one that is expansive and always evolving. 

Limited run of baby pink tote bags with typography designed by artist Ed Fella.

These limited-edition Carla T-shirts were designed and hand-dyed by L.A. artist Jamie Felton and printed on the softest recycled cotton tees by EVERYBODY.WORLD in Los Angeles, California.

Edition of 100 unique t-shirts.

Many of the artists across this issue address deeply seated traumas of violence, slavery, white supremacy, extraction, and capitalism while also finding passages through and out of these entrenched systems. They do so with community, family, and an earnest desire for visibility and exchange at the center of their practice.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This issue features writing on artists Kevin Beasley, Ulysses Jenkins, Sara Cwynar, Genevieve Gaignard, Derek Fordjour, Jimena Sarno, Ei Arakawa, Jacci Den Hartog, and more.

The idea of a doppelganger—some uncanny figure parading around with our same essence—invites a certain degree of trepidation…

Instead of fearing the doppleganger, placing it within a realm of paranormal unease, an open communion with the fluidity of identity can help those of us in the artworld evolve and rewrite cultural constructs that have begun to feel especially limited.”

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This issue features writing on artists Arnold J. Kemp, Kang Seung Lee, Leslie Dick, Amia Yokoyama, Sessa Englund, Em Kettner, Beverly Fishman, and more.

Read the Digital Issue Here

Amidst the uprisings for Black lives, we must acknowledge our responsibility to create a shared discourse that is critical, rigorous, communal, and inclusive. In a recent article, art critic Jessica Lynne called for “writing that seeks accountability,” denoting language as an opportunity for accountable exchange with others—one that invites feedback, adaptation, and debate… We hope to nurture strategies that move our discourse beyond the theoretical and out into the world via public discourse and collective organizing efforts. Carla is committed to a continual and self-reflective evolution as we work to better serve our community as a nexus for cultural discourse. 

Lindsay Preston Zappas
Carla Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Learn more about Carla’s core values here.

History is a funny thing. Past events stack onto each other, like pages in a book, deeply embedding truths and ingraining biases and beliefs. The past haunts in the present, looming over and measuring us; as artists, we often hear the mantra “it’s all been done before.” (Fears of being tropey or derivative run deep.) But looking to history can also provide context, clarity, and discovery, offering pathways forward within the particularities of our current moment.

Across this issue, we balance the present with the past, charting similarities, differences, missteps, and complications.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

I’ve been thinking about [the L.A. food critic] Jonathan Gold… The model that Gold followed—reaching beyond his own confines into unknown cuisines and small pockets of the city on a quest for surprising experiences and new people—provides an archetype for how we might maintain diversity amidst an overwhelming push towards sameness, as capitalism and gentrification threaten to overtake our Los Angeles neighborhoods.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Across this issue, themes of home, origin, and transition abound, situating us somewhere at the nexus of the three…Across time, our sense of home and nascent belonging rests precariously, relying on external forces—cultural, social, political—to shape their fate. How does our current moment endow our individual and unique pasts?

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

We often hear the idiom that “new is better,” but lately L.A. has been graced with several stunning exhibitions of works by artists that have been at it for decades—proving that duration can be just as provocative as novelty…These lifetimes of work prove not only an undeniable technical prowess by the artists responsible, but also that dedicating a lifetime to artmaking…is really one of the most decisive actions a person can take.

–Lindsay Preston Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

This is an offering to the magnetic, varied, weird, and pulsing artistic production that is happening in Los Angeles right now…This publication aims to connect our disparate circles; various venues and artists—both young and established—will receive the same level of discourse…L.A.’s manically active art scene has plenty more to discuss than what fits into one or two 600 word reviews in the back of a New York or London based art magazine. Carla is a centralized space for writing that is bold, honest, approachable, and focused on the here and now.

–Lindsay Preston-Zappas, Founder & Editor-in-Chief