Founded in 1978, Whitewalls began as a publication for artists working with language, featuring contributions from many prominent figures in text and language-driven art and concrete poetry. The magazine continues to promote a wide array of “writings by artists.”

This issue is a return to themed issues after a break in issues 19 and 20. It also indicates the continued efforts of editor Timothy Porges to re-articulate the mission statement of Whitewalls ten years after its inception. The theme of “Palimpsests” is appropriate to this effort. From the editors: “A palimpsest, in a lexical sense, is a situation of overwhelming. One text becomes the substratum, or context-of-underlying assumptions…the term seems more useful than, say, the more traditional ‘Image/Text’ in that it establishes a certain kind of relationship…It is a relationship of alternating displacement and appropriation characteristic of the avant-garde which has realized that the middle-ground between cooptation and marginality is now reduced to an effective zero.”

Contributors to this issue include Jeanne Dunning, Susan Morgan, Paul Chidester, Kay Rosen, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and David French.