Artist Meetup Blog Entry 9

September 2024: Community Agreements

This month, as a continuation of our first cycle of Arts and Ethics programming, members from our community gathered to prepare the “rules of the road” for how our artist meetups would conduct interdisciplinary critiques.

Our first critique session will be held next month, on October 17th at 6pm.

This preparation comes on the heels of our first meetup of the cycle—our Forum—in which membership asked for us to collectively generate a set of community agreements for our critiques. There, we also discussed the language around critiques, and how some folks preferred the concept of feedback or workshops.

So why do we feel more comfortable with some terms over others? How different, really, are critiques, feedback sessions, and workshops? The answer to these questions shines a light on why there is even a need to establish community agreements prior to an event as tender as a critique:

As we each navigate within spaces of community, we do so through our lived experiences, which is to say we channel our memories, fears, excitements, passions, grief, and all other residue of our past into action. Community work celebrates subjectivity. It honors particularly that we bring our very imperfect, very subjective selves to our gathering space.

Community Work Celebrates Subjectivity

Varied relationships to terms, even those as similar as critique/feedback/workshop, are crucial to a healthy community. Noted from last month’s gathering, critiques felt “posh” to some—one member last month jokingly said “it’s too French!”—while for others, feedback didn’t carry the same sort of weight. Workshops, on the other hand, can feel more neutral, though it was noted that to workshop, as a verb, felt there was an implication that changes to the work must be made. How interesting! What can be extrapolated from this?

When we consider terms used within a space of community feedback, we notice that there, too, we find words that different folks might interact with differently. For example: some artists may think that saying a piece is “good” or “nice” is high praise, while another could receive that as vague, unnecessary, or interpret it as an outright lie; one artist, acting through their own desires and needs, might give very intense, detailed notes in an attempt to show the receiving artist that they care, that they are paying close attention to the energy that goes into the work, while another artist might receive that feedback as too forward or controlling.

We see that, in inviting community reflection, we will always have to juggle differences. For this session, preparing the “rules of the road,” we chose to begin navigating subjectivity with the following agreements:

Community Agreements for Artist Meetup 10/17/24

  • Empathic honesty
    • Understanding
  • What do we have in common before we even begin critiquing?
  • What critical thoughts are we afraid to hear?
    • In other words: before we even share our thoughts or our art work, what judgment do we hear inside of ourselves that scares us the most?
  • We will always practice constructive criticism
    • First, by asking “What do you need from this particular critique?”
    • Then, responding with polite suggestions
  • We will always work to create a safe space together
    • A space of non-competition
    • A space where works-in-progress are encouraged
  • We will begin each session by freewriting our own forms of a “pledge”/”oath”/”toast” for the session, based in this simple truth:
    • We will seek to find one another through the receiving and sharing of our art
  • We will respect each other’s time and energy
  • Most importantly, we will reflect on this: how can we best receive the thoughts, feedback, critique, and praise honestly? 

This is exactly how our list came to be on the white board in our meeting room. You may notice it begins with vague aspirations and works itself toward more complex needs. This is excellent, a perfect artifact of precisely how we come to negotiate these sorts of agreements. I was so happy to see the progression of suggestions over the course of this session. For the majority of these agreements, I suggest that you as a reader take some time to really sit with and internalize them as you feel they speak to you—there may in fact be no one way to execute these agreements.

I would like to expound on a few of the points, providing the context that helped to build these lines:

“What judgment do we hear inside of ourselves that scares us the most?”

Before we even approach another person to ask for feedback, we often already have echoes of those suggestions that we do not want to hear rattling around inside of us. Our community agreements ask that we seek to identify these fears before we approach our community space. What can be learned by communicating with our fears?

For many artists, a foundational fear may be as simple as this: “I feel like an imposter.”

I know that feeling well. Many of you reading this may know that feeling, too. I think, by committing ourselves to the gathering at all, we show each other and we show ourselves that we are not imposters but instead valued members of a beautiful, caring community of fierce thinkers and makers.

“What do you need from this particular critique?”

Our critique sessions will practice a willingness to guide one another through this dance.

For example (of what not to do), if you display your art and give no instruction on what sort of feedback you are looking for, your colleague may accidentally give you feedback on something you weren’t ready for, and that might hurt your feelings. Of course, neither of you want that! So instead, the suggestion-giver must be provided appropriate criteria to form a desired critique.

An invitation to critique might go something like this:
“Today I want to share with you this acrylic painting of the sunset over the sea. I feel comfortable with the composition and the color choices, but I am interested to know what you think about the brush strokes and the scale: do you think the mark making works well, and do you think it would work better if it were much larger?”

Or this:
“I’d like to play you a song I’ve been writing. Its lyrics are fairly abstract, and I’m eager to know if they communicate the underlying feeling I am trying to convey.” The songwriter might then ask the listeners for even more precise notes, such as: “When I say x line, do you feel y way?”

“We will begin each session by freewriting our own forms of a pledge/oath/toast for the session, based on this simple truth: We will seek to find one another through the receiving and sharing of our art.”

As with our earlier thoughts on critique/feedback/workshop, our community hotly debated the use of pledge, oath, and toast as concepts of community celebration and self-commitment to an agreed-upon cause. And so, because we all have different connotations about each, I included them all!The crux of this act of commitment to the critique is this: we gather for these events, critique or not, to see each other, to experience the thoughts and compassion and tenderness of our peers. In these sessions, it should always remain paramount that we remember we are here, still, to see each other.

Community Agreements In Conversation

This act of generating a fluid, ever-evolving list of community agreements is inspired by a keynote speech-turned-essay that has guided much of my community organizing pedagogy over the past few years. Jarrett M. Drake’s “Liberatory Archives: Towards Belonging and Believing” (part 1; part 2) invites a conversation around the concept of an archive operated, owned, held in the hearts and minds of its community:

“[T]oday represents a small but significant shift in that thinking [about archives used by the governing bodies as a way to control knowledge]. This forum is an opportunity, I feel, to pivot from breaking down and pivot towards building up. It’s an opportunity to forget the oppressor and focus on the oppressed. It’s an opportunity to see not only what is but also see what can be. It’s an opportunity to probe our potential and invest in our imagination. It’s an opportunity to unshackle our chains and unlock our futures as humans, as community members, as archivists, and as memory workers. It’s an opportunity to be free.

To get us started on that justice-filled journey, I have two goals I want to accomplish with this address. The first goal is to heighten your awareness to common characteristics of the archival endeavor that I hope community archives will avoid replicating. The second goal is to investigate the import of liberatory archives — which are a type of community archive — by focusing on two actions that these spaces have the potential to engineer: the action of belonging and the action of believing. The action of belonging and the action of believing are two of the most fundamental exercises of the human spirit, and it’s my argument that liberatory archives possess the potential to engender both actions within communities whose humanity traditional archives fail to recognize and respect.”

Drake suggests that a community must successfully break oppressive ideas in order to build back a schema of community healing. He posits that, if we do not fully break that fundamental oppressive force, our design could accidentally perpetuate it.

Without going into a full analysis of Drake’s speech (you should really go have a read for yourself—it’s well worth it), the main components of the traditional “archive” he seeks to refute are silence, solitude, and surveillance. For our purposes, I am cracking open our concept of the “archive” to include these “rules of the road” we have begun to create, and which we will undoubtedly add to as we carry on. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, who I have referenced previously in another blog post, would actually argue that this systematization of collective action—scoring a system of rules that we hold within us—is part of the “repertoire,” not the “archive,” but for the purposes of entering into conversation with Drake’s speech, we use the latter.
If this kind of work interests you, consider this short chapter from Debates in the Digital Humanities titled “The Archive after Theory”—it’s where I first read about Drake’s work as well as many other fantastic concepts.

Silence, solitude, and surveillance.

As we move into a series of critique sessions, we should think about how each collectively-generated community agreement breaks these three concepts. We can begin this work at home, right now, reading these very words.

How do you celebrate? Do you throttle your joy? If so, why?

How do you gather with others? Do you let your peers know you? Do you allow yourself to have peers, or do you find that you must always find and embellish a power dynamic?

How do you perceive yourself? How do you perceive others? Do you find that you crave discovering imperfections in yourself or others? If so, why?

Interested in a complete and ever-expanding list of references made across all of our Artist Meetup blog entries? Visit our Artist Meetup Blog’s new Annotated Bibliography!

Our Artist Meetup series is supported by New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. A first-in-the-nation project, the Consortium reimagines how public funding can be used to address the growing problem of news deserts, misinformation, and support more informed communities.