Critique as Gift is a research project put into practice through a crit club in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is a collaboration with artist Katherine Diemert whom I met at NSCAD University while she was doing her MFA and I a Master in Art Education.
Traditionally, to offer our work up for critique asks us to be vulnerable, and as the critic, to operate from a space of extremes. Drawing from our personal experiences as undergraduate and recent graduate students and from the position of the post-secondary teacher (Katherine, MFA 2025) and socially engaged art facilitator (Laura, MAAE 2025) we reflect on our research on doing critique as creative process and generous offering.
In preparation for a conference workshop in 2024 we began to play and envision new ways of ‘doing critique.’ These meetings were informed by research from Terry Barrett’s (2019) framework, Leslie Dick’s (2018) “soft talk” approach, and Jorge Lucero’s (2023) “teacher posture” concept. Rather than an event of social/peer judgement we began to envision reciprocity between students, makers, and facilitators.
Following the conference workshop, we co-wrote an essay for Canadian Art Teacher (2025) titled Critique as Gift. The essay is freely available on Érudit.
In 2026, we launched Critique as Gift Crit Club, a pilot program running for three sessions, from May to July 2026, open to the arts community in Halifax. Three artists present their work and other creative participants engage in guided critique facilitated by myself and Katherine Diemert. In Critique as Gift Crit Club we facilitate with a modified version of Liz Lerman’s Creative Response Process (CRP). While CRP is meant to work in progress, we use it also for finished work. Find out more here.
In their book Critique is Creative, Liz Lerman and John Borstel mention the use of a chocolate cake to demonstrate their steps of the critique framework. We have borrowed this idea and expanded it to use food as material and creative work to ease into the crit with a new group of people each time. Katherine and I take turns as presenting artist bringing a food offering for the crit session before diving into artists’ critiques.
