About Us
The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which we write about art, video games, books, food, life, the weather, whatever’s in our heart(s). We publish a new text every Sunday, which also goes out as audio on our Podcast. OUR FIRST BOOK ‘POOR ARTISTS’ IS OUT NOW in hardback, audiobook and ebook! Paperback next year! if you are in North America, get Poor Artists here. Besides the writing and the podcast, we also run a Successful Funding Application Library, and a monthly working class Creatives Grant. See Instagram, see the YouTube channel we sometimes add to. We’ve been writing since 2015 so if you don’t know where to start, here’s a best-of list here.
TWP origins:
Back in 2015, during our final year of art school, we had a chat about exhibition reviews and how they were either boring, lifeless, overly academic, or too polite. And they are basically all written by middle class white men and that’s just silly at this point. We decided to start writing ourselves and actually state how art made us feel (happy, bored, angry, in love). We tried to write in a way like we were falling through our feelings and simply writing about art along the way. Over the years, we attracted a big readership and started to visit universities to meet students who were basically our age. In one of these lectures, someone would put their hand up in the dark and call this embodied criticism. If you wanna hear the full story from beginning to end, we made a podcast episode about it here.
TWP now:
Zarina is in London and Gabrielle’s in Liverpool. Our office is literally WhatsApp. As the years rolled on, we expanded our writing beyond exhibitions and now we cover all the little bits of our lives here on the website. We really love writing and can’t believe we get to carry on doing this for our jobs. We are also grateful that we get to use our platform to criticise some of the scarier goings-on in the art industry. We hope that we can have an impact in making the arts a fairer, safer, more accessible, and more enjoyable space for all.
TWP lifeline:
We can only continue to exist because 1. we have part-time jobs doing other things and 2. some of our readers support us through a Patreon subscription, or through one-off donations through Paypal or Ko-fi. Each of these services is a little bit different. On Patreon, you can give us £1 or more a month, or pay for a full year in one go, and in return you can redeem stickers and postcards. On Paypal, you can send us a one-off show of support. And on Ko-Fi, you can do either a one-off tip or a monthly one instead. If you donate to any of these, we can send you an invitation to our Discord server where we hang out with readers. It’s a really lovely community. We love our readers!!!!! :D
VBW, GDLP + ZM
if you want to talk: [email protected]
we have signed up to PACBI’s Academic and Cultural Boycott campaign, which involves not working with or providing work for Israeli cultural institutions. This includes writing about work that they have commissioned. If you spot an oversight/something that slipoed through our net, please let us know (on the email above). If you’d like to find out more about PACBI, go to their website or WAWOG’s. If you have any questions, feel free to contact WAWOG: PACBI(@)wawog(.)com
