Crit is embarking on an ~interlude~ this season in order to imagine new possibilities for our community. While we aren't gathering a Fall cohort right now, we hope you'll stay tuned for announcements about special programming, events, and other reasons not to be a stranger.
Want to get in touch over the break? Shoot us an email →
What is Crit?
1.
We are a group of multidisciplinary artists, writers, and designers who support one another in pursuing our creative goals, individually and collectively.
2.
We welcome inspiration and insight from artists working in different media from our own. Artists working in any medium are welcome.
3.
We gather every other week during a season to discuss ideas, share inspiration, and present works in progress. We also organize a mid-semester retreat in order to deepen relationships and continue conversations. We then culminate each season with a collaborative group show.
4.
We are equally interested in what art feels like as it is being made as when it is finished. We look forward to how our projects evolve over time through exposure to our peers.
5.
We celebrate the creative process, and above all, we respect one another.
Our Values
A Conscious Critique
We strive to be members of a conscious, loving, and fruitful creative community.
Conscious because we are each here to be alive and awake for each other, in good faith and mutual respect; Loving because we are here to break down walls and to build bonds; Fruitful because what we seek together will make us better artists and citizens.
We believe that how we operate during our time together is a microcosm of how we operate outside of it.
The dynamics we develop and the challenges that arise within Crit are ones we will bring into our larger communities. Therefore, we are intentional about how we perform critique and what we bring into and out of the space we hold together.
Critique is a tool we use to create more possibility for ourselves and our art.
We critique (and get critiqued) because we care to engage. We critique because "being critical" is a generative awareness that brings into focus our questions and our hopes for what could be. To that end, we are critical of power. We are critical of worship of power. We are critical of complacency. We are critical of cool. We are critical of the myth of the lone visionary artist. We are continually critical of our position within oppressive systems (like art, education, status, race, class and the aesthetics of each) and seek to undo the harms these systems cause, even and especially when those harms come from ourselves.
We seek a better world through the practice of our art and the practice of community.
We seek honesty and the healing it brings. We seek the conditions for new experiences, new feelings and ideas. We seek a vision of the artist as a being in constant evolution, in relationship to the world, open to influence, ready to change and be changed.