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

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

bell hooks (1994)

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

Posted in culture, education, politics, theory

Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion

Liz Lerman (2026)

A sequel to Hiking the Horizontal, Liz Lerman’s Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion is a choreographic manifesto for living in motion—part memoir, part creative toolkit, part philosophical inquiry. Written in a series of essays, from single-paragraph meditations to expansive chapters, the book weaves together personal anecdotes, creative theory, and movement-based wisdom. Lerman draws on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to frame a central question: how do we hold both shape and momentum—form and change—at once?

Posted in art, biography, culture, education, feedback, theory

A Beginner’s Guide to Devising Theatre

Jess Thorpe and Tashi Gore (2019)

Much of the theatre we make starts with a script and a story given to us by someone else. But what happens when we’re required to start from scratch? How do we begin to make theatre using our own ideas, our own perspective, our own stories?

A Beginner’s Guide to Devising Theatre, written by the artistic directors of the award-winning young people’s performance company Junction 25 and is aimed at those new to devising or wanting to further develop their skills. It explores creative ways to create original theatre from a contemporary stimulus.

It offers a structure within which to approach the creative process, including ideas on finding a starting point, generating material, composition and design; it offers practical ideas for use in rehearsal; and it presents grounding in terminology that will support a confident and informed approach to production.

Posted in art, education

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

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