Editor's Note

Karyna McGlynn, Zachary Martin

The first issue of Domestic Crude, the journal that would ultimately become Gulf Coast, was published in 1982. We recently turned up what is perhaps the only extant copy of that issue, opened to page one, and found the very first piece we ever published-text or art-was a black and white photograph by J.J. Gallegos of mud wrestling in a Texas honky-tonk. As that photo and the tongue-in-cheek title indicate, Domestic Crude was a journal that aimed from the start for a subversive take on the complicated and often contradictory culture of Houston.

Maybe it's the Texans in us, but more than thirty years later, Gulf Coast-despite the name change, despite the expanded focus of the journal and its international roster of artists and writers-has tried to maintain some of that renegade spirit. We have also been sure to maintain our association with visual art, hence the evolution of the journal's full title to the one you see on the cover today: Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

Just as that title was becoming a permanent part of the Gulf Coast identity, another arts publication across town was busy making a name for itself. Originally a bimonthly journal covering the Houston visual arts scene, Art Lies rapidly grew into a biannual that brought Gulf Coast area artists, curators, scholars, and critics into dialogue with their peers around the globe, never losing its enthusiasm for, or its skepticism of, the visual arts. As the name suggests, Art Lies is a journal committed to irreverence and wit. In the first piece of the first issue of Art Lies, the great art critic Dave Hickey writes in "The Vegas Manifesto":

I want art that takes risks-an art I can buy and buy into,

   so that I can share those risks, so I can look at it longer,

   so that I can exchange a piece of paper signed by a bureaucrat for one

      signed by a soldier of desire

I want an art that is so fucking amazing it is illegal in the boondocks and

      -believing that anyhing worth dong is worth doing fast and loud

   -I  w a n t  v i s u a l  r o c k  a n d  r o l l.

This issue that you are holding inaugurates a new era in Gulf Coast's history, one that brings together Art Lies and Gulf Coast as a single nonprofit organization producing a single publication biannually. Reading those early issues of Domestic Crude and Art Lies, this merger has the feeling of inevitability. It joins two Houston based art publlications committed to giving lie to the assumption that the middle of the country is filled with fly-over states when it comes to the literary and visual arts. You may not find mud wrestling or manifestos in these pages, but perhaps insisting that the Gulf is as important a coast as the East ir West when it comes to the creative arts is subversive enough.

With that in mind we encourae you to read the new Art Lies section of Gulf Coast, especially Bridger Cooks' essay about Houston's 1971 The De Luxe Show, the major racially inegrated exhibition of contemporary art in America, and Lucy Bradock's essay on Walter Hopps, a curator who came of age on the West Coast bt whose most lasting impact may have been as the founding director of Hosuton's world famous Menil-Collection. With any luck, this issue will find you moving fluidly between the verse script of Mary Reid Kelly, whose art is featured on the cover; the ekphrastic poetry of Donald Platt, Adam Vines, Mathew Pennock, Angie Estes, and others; and our roundtable on graphic storytelling. It's true: art lies, but never more so than when it throws up artificial boundaries between forms and genres. This new iteration of Gulf Coast will seek to break some of those boundaries down and fufill its mission as a journal of literature and fine arts.