Critique Is Creative: The Critical Response Process in Theory and Action

Liz Lerman and John Borstel (2022)

Devised by choreographer Liz Lerman in 1990, Critical Response Process (CRP) is an internationally recognized method for giving and getting feedback on creative works in progress. In this first in-depth study of CRP, Lerman and her long-term collaborator John Borstel describe in detail the four-step process, its origins and principles. The book also includes essays on CRP from a wide range of contributors. With insight, ingenuity, and the occasional challenge, these practitioners shed light on the applications and variations of CRP in the contexts of art, education, and community life. Critique is Creative examines the challenges we face in an era of reckoning and how CRP can aid in change-making of various kinds.

With contributions from: Bimbola Akinbola, Mark Callahan, Isaac Gómez, Lekelia Johnson, Elizabeth Johnson Levine, Lawrence Edelson, Carlos Lopez-Real, Cristóbal Martínez, Gesel Mason, Cassie Meador, Rachel Miller Jacobs, Kevin Ormsby, CJay Philip, Kathryn Prince, Sean Riley, Charles C. Smith, Shula Strassfeld, Phil Stoesz, Gerda van Zelm, Jill Waterhouse, Rebekah West

Posted in art, education, feedback

Hands on Research for Artists, Designers & Educators

Edited by Miriam Rasch, Jojanneke Gijsen, and Harma Staal (2024)

Hands On Research for Artists, Designers & Educators presents the research process through six actions: research by making, research of context, participatory research, reflecting on research, documenting research and making public. Each action is equally important and can be your starting point. The guide introduces the circular model of doing research visually, with many examples, images and practical tools. It highlights the unique and rich aspects of practice-based research, while being accessible and applicable to different disciplines.

Posted in art, design, education

An Indigenous Present

Edited by Jeffrey Gibson (2023)

This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice.

It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.

Posted in art, culture, history, myth, politics

Black, Queer, & Untold

By Jon Key (2024)

Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who got him. So he started asking himself questions:

What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male?

In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key answers these questions and manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up. He pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon. before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon.

Posted in art, culture, design, education, history

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice

Edited by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake (2025)

As part of the Getty Center’s PST ART initiative, Breath(e) considers the connections between climate change, environmental justice and social justice through the lens of contemporary art. This book features approximately 45 works focused on climate change by a group of intergenerational contemporary artists, scientists and activists, addressing deforestation, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, water pollution, extraction and atmospheric politics.

Posted in art, environment, exhibition, science

Let’s Talk About Critique: Reimagining Art and Design Education

Elissa Armstrong and Mariah Doren (2023)

Let’s Talk about Critique examines how critique in art education has evolved, how it falls short, and what else it could be. Elissa Armstrong and Mariah Doren contextualize current practices by discussing the history of critique, the field of education, and the characteristics of today’s students. Then they offer suggestions for ways to have more open, inclusive, and dynamic classroom conversations about art and design. The core of the book consists of critique format descriptions, written by experienced educators, that provide a wide variety of thoughtful approaches that can be readily adapted and used.

Posted in art, education, feedback

Seed Pods of Democracy

Democracy Poster Project (2024)

The Democracy Poster Project explores the value of democracy and human rights through the visual art medium of posters, and proposes ways that design can act as a voice for participation in society. The Democracy Poster Project team (director Moon Jung Jang, along with curators Kyungwon Kim and Yumi Kang) contacted designers, illustrators, and visual artists around the world who have consistently expressed interest in issues of democracy and human rights, and who could disseminate these messages concisely and accurately through poster work.

In response, 51 participating artists (or teams of artists) crafted messages in different visual languages, producing 100 new posters and generating accompanying texts.

Participating artists acutely point out the reality of democracy’s retreat across various times and spaces and constantly ask questions about the causes. In addition, they address the core values of democracy such as equality, diversity of existence, and minority human rights, as well as structural discrimination and violence against women, the right to movement of the disabled, the right to work in a humane environment, and the right of refugees and immigrants to be respected. Their thoughts and expressions about resistance to the advancement of democracy and human rights, freedom through struggle, and methods for open empathy and solidarity continue to form complex and solid links.

Participating artists include designers and visual artists who represent the voice of the here and now through their various works and exhibitions at major art museums, including Karo Akpokiere, Kim Albrecht, Jonathan Barnbrook, Melinda Beck, Diana Ejaita, Mark Gowing, Guerrilla Girls, High on Type, Saki Ho, Minho Kwon, Sang Mun, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll, Garth Walker, Kateryna Korolevtseva, Elaine Lopez, Studio Rejane Dal Bello, and others from around the world. Participants also include illustrators of social and cultural issues for influential media outlets and organizations such as The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Amnesty International.

In addition, the writings of invited authors Jung Keun-Sik, Kim Sang-kyu, Keiko Sei, and Ezio Manzini have also been compiled to ponder the questions “How do we represent issues of violence in movements for democracy and human rights?” “What does it mean to visually remember a history of violence by the state, and what are the possibilities and limitations of such visual expression?” “Where is activism currently taking place in visual culture and today?” and “What can design do for democracy?”

Posted in art, culture, design, exhibition, politics

The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, heather ahtone, Joy Harjo, and Shana Bushyhead Condill (2023)

The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brings together works by many of today’s most boldly innovative Native American artists. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, one of the leading artists and curators of her generation, has carefully chosen some fifty works across a diversity of practices—including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video—that share the common thread of the land.

Posted in art, culture, environment, exhibition, history, myth

Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us

Legacy Russell (2024)

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights.

Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.

Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

Posted in art, culture, history, media, photography, politics, printmaking, semiotics, technology, theory

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print

Jennifer L. Roberts (2024)

In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today.

The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond.

National Gallery of Art video lecture series:
https://www.nga.gov/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts/roberts-2021.html

Posted in art, culture, design, history, language, media, printmaking, technology, theory

The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths

Anna Abraham (2024)

Drawing on theoretical and empirical work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Anna Abraham offers an examination of human creativity that reveals the true complexity underlying our conventional beliefs about the brain. The chapters in the book explore the myth of the right brain as the hemisphere responsible for creativity; the relationship between madness and creativity, psychedelics and creativity, atypical brains and creativity, and intelligence and creativity; the various functions of dopamine; and lastly, the default mode revolution, which theorized that the brain regions most likely to be involved in the creative process are those areas of the brain that are most active during rest or mind-wandering.

Posted in consciousness, history, myth, science