Momus Emerging Critics Residency
Details
OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION
Momus, in partnership with OCAD University, invites applications for the first Toronto edition of the Momus Emerging Critics Residency, taking place from August 17-28, with online classes and possible face-to-face meetings. Open to industry professionals, OCAD U faculty, senior students, and graduates, this intensive summer program aims to foster the next generation of art writers and publishers through mentorship and practical skills development. Participants will gain access to Momus’s founding publisher and editorial staff, as well as contributing editors and critics, while tapping into Momus’s readership and international network. Topics and assignments unfold online and through one-on-one mentorship.
A renewed relevance in art criticism and art publishing in recent years provides the backdrop to this residency. With an increase in publishing opportunities in the digital era, emerging art writers, editors, and publishers are in need of greater transparency and preparation to enter a surging discourse and navigate a populated, rapidly evolving field.
Together, we will tackle the most relevant issues facing art criticism in the 21st century, with a focus on publishing in the digital age, including; pitching, editing, podcasting, budgeting, collaborating, hustling, and getting published. The Momus Residency will help bridge an existing gap between BFA and graduate programs in art history and criticism to address the professional realities, requirements, etiquette, and skills required to navigate the field. Momus workshop leaders will also engage in the most recent and relevant debates in art criticism, bringing participants to the present moment in contemporary art.
DATES
August 17-28 (with optional second week of remote mentorship)
CURRICULUM
Includes the following topics:
Writing, the process. This includes pitching, working with an editor, time-management, mapping and preparing for deadlines, structuring your piece, adjusting your argument across drafts, etc.
• Working freelance vs with an editorial team: the goals and challenges to prospecting and writing from within, and outside, a publishing institution.
• Writer/editor perspectives on a rigorous edit (with illustrative examples), taking a detailed look at what shifts over the course of the pitch-to-publish process.
• The scope of writer-remuneration rates, tips for negotiation, and budgeting your life as a freelancer.
• Criticism vs art writing and art journalism (historical & practical perspectives).
• Current debates and discourses in online art publishing.
• Online vs print publishing: the realities and potentials for writer, editor, and publisher, and the implications for your readers across various media.
• Collaboration vs competition, and protecting your work.
• Interviewing your subjects: when it’s useful, and when it works against your own critical line. We’ll also touch on the etiquette, ethics, and skills of interviewing.
INSTRUCTORS (biographies below)
- Nora N. Khan
- Andy Patton
- Tammer El-Sheikh
- Casey Beal
- Sky Goodden
ELIGIBILITY
The program is open to professionals, OCAD U faculty, current undergraduate or graduate students, and alumni with a practice or keen interest in critical writing.
PARTNER
Momus, https://momus.ca/
TUITION & FUNDING
The regular fee for this two-week residency program is $600.00 CAD.
Letters of invitation and endorsement will be provided to those participants applying for grants to attend.
Participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation, as well as any travel visa requirements for entry into Canada.
Six OCAD U students graduating in 2020 or recent graduates who graduated in 2019 will be eligible to receive a $500.00 subsidy toward the cost of tuition.
Applicants must indicate whether they want to be considered for funding assistance ($500) in order to be eligible. The deadline for this application is May 10, 2020 at midnight.
HOW TO APPLY
There are two ways to apply:
1. For the Momus Residency (details below). The deadline for this application is May 31, 2020.
2. For funding. In order to be considered for funding, applicants must indicate their interest in the Momus Residency application. The deadline for this application is May 10, 2020 at midnight.
HOW TO APPLY FOR THE MOMUS RESIDENCY
Please submit the documents below in a single pdf file by email to: residency@momus.ca
Your application should include:
1. Completed application form (download link: here)
2. A letter of intent (500 words maximum) outlining your background and interest in contemporary art and art criticism, as well as your goals for participating in the Momus Emerging Critics Residency.
3. A resume (2 pages maximum), indicating your past and current education, employment, projects, and publications. References are not required.
QUESTIONS
Questions regarding the residency program may also be directed to residency@momus.ca
DEADLINE
For Momus: May 31, 2020, 11:59pm EST
For funding: May 10, 2020, 11:59pm EST
About Momus
Momus is an international online art publication and podcast that stresses "a return to art criticism" that is evaluative, accountable, and brave. Momus has attracted a wide readership over its first five years and has been shortlisted twice for the International Award for Art Criticism. Momus produces a podcast, named one of the “top-ten art podcasts” by The New York Times in 2020. It also published a print anthology, "Momus: A Return to Art Criticism Vol. 1 (2014-17)." The Momus Emerging Critics Residency began in August 2019, in collaboration with Concordia University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and with the support of former US Ambassador to Canada, Bruce and Vicki Heyman. Residencies are scheduled for Concordia University and OCAD University in Summer 2020. Momus has featured such notable voice as Catherine G. Wagley, Rahel Aima, Saelan Twerdy, David Garneau, Himali Singh Soin, Tausif Noor, Jarrett Earnest, Aruna D’Souza, Nora Khan, and Andrew Berardini.
About the Instructors
Nora N. Khan
Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism. She is on the faculty of Rhode Island School of Design, Digital + Media, teaching critical theory, artistic research, writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism. She has two short books: Seeing, Naming, Knowing (The Brooklyn Rail, 2019), on machine vision, and with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017), on fan forums and conspiracy theories online. Forthcoming this year is The Artificial and the Real, through Art Metropole. She is currently an editor of The Force of Art along with Carin Kuoni and Moses Serubiri, and is a longtime editor at Rhizome. She publishes in Art in America, Frieze, Flash Art, Mousse, 4Columns, Brooklyn Rail, Rhizome, California Sunday, Spike Art, The Village Voice, and Glass Bead. She has written commissioned essays for exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale, the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Swiss Institute, and Kunstverein in Hamburg. This year, as The Shed’s first guest curator, she organized the exhibition Manual Override, featuring Sondra Perry, Simon Fujiwara, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Martine Syms. Her writing has been supported by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation (2018), an Eyebeam Research Residency (2017), and a Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her research and writing practice extends to a large range of artistic collaborations, which include librettos, performances, and exhibition essays, scripts, and a tiny house.
Andy Patton
Andy Patton began to write criticism in the late 1970s, at a time when artists were discouraged from writing. Over the decades he wrote criticism and essays for Artists Review, Parachute, Fuse, Yishu and Momus, as well as catalogue essays for artists such as Jamelie Hassan, Kim Adams, Ron Benner, Gordon Lebredt, and Yam Lau. His reviews were based in close readings of artworks, but he has also written on wider topics such as the crisis in beauty, the production of space, aesthetic theory in pre-modern China, the ecology of limitations, and the writing of art’s history. Reading poetry has been critically important to him. It served as a way of fencing in theory’s generalizing power. For a decade he wrote poetry collaboratively with the poets, Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. As Pain Not Bread, they wrote Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei which was published by Brick Books in 2000. He has taught at OCADU, Western, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the University of Toronto’s graduate program. For several years he taught OCAD University’s graduate course in “Art Writing” which was populated by many remarkable students.
Patton began as a Conceptual Artist but took up painting in the late 1970s. He lives in Toronto with his wife, the artist Janice Gurney. He represented Canada in the Fifth Biennale of Sydney. In 2014, his text paintings were included in The Transformation of
Canadian Landscape Art exhibition in Xi’an, which later traveled to Beijing. His recent book, LittleTestament, gathers the essay he was asked to write for theTransformation catalogue and the lecture on his work he gave in Xi’an. It was published in 2017 by Blue Medium Press.
Dr. Tammer El-Sheikh
Dr. Tammer El-Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Art History at York University in Toronto. Previously he taught at Concordia University in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Since completing his PhD at McGill in 2013, Tammer has developed research and teaching interests in tandem. In addition to introductory courses in Art History and Cultural Studies, he has lead senior undergraduate and graduate-level seminars in Postcolonial Theory and Art History, Art and Politics of the Middle East, Art of the 1960s in Europe and America, Global Contemporary Art and Ideas, Methods in Art History, Critical Methods and Practices, and the History and Practice of Art Criticism. In his posts at York and Concordia he has worked closely with both studio art and art history students, very often in the same classes. This has enabled Tammer to develop curriculum that is both historically grounded and keyed to developments in contemporary art. It has also provided opportunities for fruitful exchanges and collaborations between studio artists and art historians within and between his classes. Since his undergraduate days at the University of Toronto, Tammer has maintained a practice as an art critic as well. He has written feature articles and reviews for Parachute, C Magazine, ETC Magazine, and Canadian Art, and longer essays for a number of exhibition catalogues both in Canada and abroad. Most recently he contributed an essay to Berlin-based, Canadian artist Shannon Bool’s monograph Shannon Bool: Bombshell (Verlag fur moderne Kunst, 2019). He is currently working on a review essay of the National Gallery of Canada’s international Indigenous art exhibition Abadakone: Continuous Fire for Border Crossings. In the past few years he has written around thirty reviews of contemporary art exhibitions as a Montreal and Toronto correspondent for the website Akimbo.
Casey Beal
Casey Beal is the Senior Editor of Momus, and a freelance writer and editor based on Vancouver Island. He studied at the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, and was recently the inaugural artist-in-residence at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario.
Sky Goodden
Sky Goodden is the founding Publisher and Editor of Momus, which has been shortlisted for two International Awards for Art Criticism since its inauguration in 2014. Its contributors have been awarded nine Creative Capital Warhol Grants for Art Writers, and a Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. Momus published its first print compendium in 2017, which toured across Canada, the US, and Mexico. Goodden was the Artist-in-Residence at Montreal’s Concordia University in 2018-19, and holds an MFA in Criticism & Curatorial Practice from OCAD University, which awarded her with an “Alumni of Influence Award.” In 2019, she was awarded the J.E.H. MacDonald Award from the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto. Goodden has published in multiple catalogues and art books, as well as Frieze, Art in America, Modern Painters, Canadian Art, C Magazine, the National Post, and Art21. She is currently hosting Momus Emerging Critics Residencies in collaboration with Concordia University (Montreal), OCAD University (Toronto), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with annual scholarships provided by the former US Ambassadors to Canada, Bruce and Vicki Heyman. Goodden is building a Momus Institute which will be based at Concordia University, Montreal in the near future.
