Critical MASS 12 Critics Announced
CRITICAL MASS is the annual Invitational Exhibition for all Artists who reside/own property in the 9 parishes of Northwest Louisiana: Beinville, Bossier, Caddo, Claiborne, DeSoto, Natchitoches, Red River, Sabine, and Webster. The purpose of the Critical Mass exhibition is to showcase the professional and emerging Artists in Northwest Louisiana and to provide professional Critical Review for Artists spanning all art disciplines.
Published Critics from across America are selected by former Critical Mass Critic, LAUREN SMART, an arts writer and critic based in Los Angeles. Her writing appears in the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, American Theatre magazine, among others. She's on the journalism faculty at Loyola Marymount University. Previously, she served on the faculty at Southern Methodist University and worked as the Arts & Culture Editor at the Dallas Observer. She founded and organized a feminist literary arts festival, Women Galore, in collaboration with the Dallas bookstore The Wild Detectives. She developed and managed a Dallas Public Library high school journalism workshop Storytellers Without Borders from 2017-2020.
The Critics (one in each Arts Discipline including Visual, Literary, Theatre, and Music-Dance) will review the works in each Discipline. Additionally, Critics will provide portfolio reviews for works on the Culturalyst Directory.
VISUAL CRITIC: LUCIA SIMEK
Lucia Arbery Simek is an artist, writer and curator and currently serves as deputy director at Dallas Contemporary. She has exhibited her artwork both locally and internationally, and has published widely on contemporary art, including most recently in Ursula. As a curator, she has mounted exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art and The Reading Room, among others, and as well as curated a permanent collection of works for the historic Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas, where she also organized a highly acclaimed series of public talks with artists and writers. She is currently working on a book of essays about the Texan landscape and mid-century artists Forrest Bess, Myron Stout and Alberto Burri, to be published by Deep Vellum Publishing.
LITERARY CRITIC: A. KENDRA GREENE
A. Kendra Greene began her museum career marrying text to the exhibition wall, painstakingly, character by character, each vinyl letter trembling at the point of a bonefolder, ready to break. Now she is the author, illustrator, and audiobook reader of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, first published by Penguin and now translated into German and French.
Her work has been presented at the Smithsonian, exhibited at The Reading Room, and supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Harvard University's Library Innovation Lab, and the University of Texas Ralph A. Johnston Memorial Fellowship at the Dobie Paisano ranch. She became an essayist during a Fulbright grant to South Korea, then left a perfectly good museum job to get her MFA at the University of Iowa as a Jacob K. Javits fellow. She has also costumed an ice age giant ground sloth, got an independent bookstore up and running, run a chemistry class out of an office park, and spent four years as associate editor of The Southwest Review.
She is a former Dallas Museum of Art writer in residence and longtime Nasher Sculpture center guest artist. In addition to workshops and community partnerships, she has also taught as visiting professor at UNC Chapel Hill, UT Dallas, and the University of Iceland. Her fine press and artist books are held in collections as far away as Qatar. Her writing has appeared in publications from Atlas Obscura to Zzyzyva, including The Guardian and Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News and D Magazine, Fourth Genre and Ninth Letter, The Common and The Normal School, LitHub and The Rumpus. Her writing has been anthologized in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research, and twice in Freeman’s. As we speak, she is squirreled away in some collection or another, composing a bestiary and a poison cabinet, respectively.
PERFORMING ARTS CRITIC: DÓRI BOSNYÁK
Dóri Bosnyák manages the Presidential Lecture & Performance Series at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. She plans and presents vibrant and relevant lectures, concerts, dance performances and theatrical experiences by world class artists to the greater West Texas community. She hails from Budapest, Hungary, which Hungarians consider the “Heart of Europe.”. Growing up in such a distinctive cultural & historical hub, she gained an appreciation for the visual and performing arts early on. She made her way to the U.S. in 2011 where she received her BA degrees in Film, Theatre and Performance Studies and International Studies at Graceland University (Lamoni, IA). After entering the performing arts field in Kansas City, MO, she made her way to TTU to earn her MFA in Arts Administration in the School of Theatre & Dance.
She serves as President to the Board of Directors for the Outside In Theatre Festival and co-chair to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region VI ASPIRE/Arts Administration track.
To learn more about submitting for Critical MASS 12, visit shrevearts.org/artistcalls