Liz Wells in Crit

Our third visiting lecturer came last week. This time, the visiting lecturer was a critic, writer, and curator, which was a nice change of pace from the artists that usually come to speak.

For her lecture on Thursday evening, she explained what she does, which is write and curate. She talked about the various books of essays and photography texts she had written as well as some of the shows she has curated. It was nice to hear about the other side of things.

The next day, she came to our critique. We began the day by again talking about the curating side of things. We got to talk more about ways to talk to curators and how to go about promoting our work to them. It is something that I deal with on a regular basis but not something that gets all that talked about in grad school. It helped me to confirm a lot of the things I was already doing and let others in on some of the hints.

Liz Wells Lecture

I was one of the people who had my work critiqued by her. It was a nice change of pace to hear about the way that a curator thought of my work instead of another artist. Artists and curators think about work very differently and have different theoretical issues that they are concerned with. The other nice aspect about the crit was the fact that she liked to start by talking about the impressions she got from the work as opposed to us presenting our work for feedback. This is something I enjoy because it gives me a glimpse of what someone with no intro to the work will think or take away from viewing it.

It was a long day, but it was productive.