The Crit Lab: Rethinking Critique

Critique is an encounter. Art is a verb.

Art is a material manifestation of an intimate lived experience. We meet the work as a moving body of ideas rather than static object- verbs not nouns. We consider its identity and vernacular within the deep specificity of each artist's worldview, in dialogue with art and with the world.

An alternate ecosystem

The Crit Lab is an alternate critical community for working artists outside academia to come together for sustained contact, with empathetic listening, radical optimism and rigorous dialogue, in an act of hope over destruction.

The Crit Lab is about the studio.

The Lab offers graduate-level critique seminars for working artists. We employ a rigorous structure and pedagogy, with critical, supportive, feedback in small ongoing artist groups. We develop critical language and engage in a dialogue with each artist’s work. We support artists to focus and push their work within the unique framework of their practice and life.

The Crit Lab was founded by artist, curator and educator Patricia Miranda, with a structured pedagogy designed to focus and deepen discussion beyond common subjective reactions.

The Lab is for artists at any level in their practice.

Career is not important - success is defined by each artists' life. The Lab invites artists who desire to grow and push their work within a small intentional community.

The requirements:

Dedicated commitment to studio practice
Openness to intentional dialogue
Radical listening and respect in the group
Present for all sessions (barring emergencies etc)

Art-making is a mostly solitary pursuit. The Crit Lab is for those who crave critical discourse, and a critical ethical community within which to get and give feedback on work. Labs offer the intense dialogue and feedback of an MFA program, without the tuition, agenda, or degree. If career, home life, or cost make an MFA prohibitive, and you don’t require the piece of paper, The Crit Lab offers a space to grow.

Language is a foundation of Crit Lab pedagogy

The Crit Lab is a community of artists engaged in serious discussion around their work. The Lab engages in intentional conversation with the work and with one another, and creates structures for individualized, supportive, inclusive dialogue. Attention to language is crucial for brave, safe, discussion that fosters real change.

The Crit Lab employs an ethical lens

We see art as situated in a social space, always in conversation with art and the discourses of culture- past, present, and into the future. This is true whether the work takes on political subjects directly, or stakes a claim for beauty as a necessary force in the world. Art-making is an inherently political act.

Art is a verb

an action, an autonomous organism with its own internal logic, syntax, and grammar. We meet this "being" on its own terms, in opposition to external or subjective ideas of success/failure, working/not working, like/don't like. The process of "opening up a radical space of uncertainty and vulnerability" (Leslie Dick) brings us into relationship with the work, tending to its openness and potentiality, its felt and conceptual nature, rather than judgment and conclusion.

Gathering in a digital or IRL room in dialogue and community is more urgent than ever. We share our work, our vision, our process, and our dreams in an outwardly focused action, and bring an intersectional, ethical stance to our work and to our micro/macro-society.

Artists are a constituency. Together we can envision and create thriving, sustainable, ethical, artistic communities, that can even change the world.

The Crit Lab is a safe brave space where artwork and ideas are shared in vulnerability and full confidence. All people and artworks are welcomed and respected as they are. In The Crit Lab we make space for one another through radical listening. Language is a foundation of Crit lab pedagogy. No harmful language or actions of any kind towards people or artwork will be tolerated. The Crit Lab reserves the right to block or expel any participant who does not respect and abide by these rules.

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