Notice
by THE EDITORS
in Fall 2025
Tafari Melisizwe, “Untitled - Chicago, IL” 2024
Know this, that in order to put one on notice, we must know what it is we know. The ability to see, to bear witness, to feel, and imbibe is more than just a field of recognition and observation. Noticing is a way of knowing. It is a way of acknowledging what it is we can see. It is also a way of sharing the meaning of that acknowledgment, a way to enable what comes after a moment of seeing: the expectation that we are transformed and will reimagine each other and the very thing we more than merely saw.
To notice is to account for the subtle, the sublime, the fringe, and the inside. Noticing is also bearing witness to the unseen which might account for all of these. For in these writings collected in our Fall 2025 issue exist those forces that push into more radical noticing. The way we see questions of labor and care. The way we acknowledge sound and sculpture as preparing a new place for us. How the eye can capture a world that is necessarily revealing another world. It is in the province of a kind of subterranean noticing, a second, more honest glance, that an experience can be altered, where an invitation to realize something you did not consider before can be given, and a voice that transverses medium and genre can issue a call to look and “see if you can see.”[1]
[1] As in the ending moments of Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou.
