Critiques

Sara Bloem, Teaching Assistant

Critique is an amazing opportunity where your mentors and peers get together, and they tell you what they really think about your work. They’re honest, and they’re constructive.  I think even beyond that, critique is this great space where you and your peers are sharing work with each other, and you can really appreciate the diversity of perspectives and experiences, and approaches that we have in our community.

One of my favorite critiques was from an assignment at Rhode Island School of Design, and every semester, my professor would give this assignment called “88 trees.” The idea is that you would go home, and you would make 88 trees that were as different from each other as possible. So we all went home, and we all worked really hard that week, and the next week, we all brought our trees in. It was amazing to see that everyone had a completely different approach to making 88 trees. Some people had different media for all their trees, some people were using acrylic paint, charcoal, and oils.  Some people used pretty much the same media, but there were cartoonists, so they did 88 funny, different joke trees, and they were all hilarious.

When they were all up on the wall, I could really appreciate how special each of my classmates’ perspectives on the world really were. Critique provided that space to really value how great each individual artist was.