Critical Mass 12 marks the determination, drive, and do it like it’s never been done before attitude that Shreveport Regional Arts Council puts into celebrating the best visual and literary art of more than 100 Northwest Louisiana artists. Critical Mass 12 brings professional critical review to encourage the artists of the region to “up their game,” awards a $2,000 commission to those artists named “Best” by nationally acclaimed critics.
Here’s to twelve amazing years!
Critical MASS 12 Literary Works
Priscilla Adams
Generational Curse
Brandon Armstrong
Ode to America’s Favorite Crown
Maudie Bryant
In the Lamplight and Selected Poems
Esau Castor
Hand in Hoof
Callie Dean
The Improbability of Fossils
June Rose Dowis
Malignant
AJ Haynes
Astral Black
Ashley Mac Havird
Excerpt from SWIMMER (a novel)
Brittney Hazelton
Heritage, Culture, Society
Ryan Hazelton
Again and Again
Lynn Laird
Transition
Madeline Joy
On Drowning in the Sky
Reece Maguire
How Does This End?
Dustin Owen
slanted + smeared
Uriah Oxford
Sticking It
Debra Roberson
You cannot erase what’s in your face
Sydney Reeves
The Diary of the Forsaken
Mikah Thomas
Couch Potato
Jerrick AKA Jrayis Deyond
Catching Up With Me
LaTerina Latrunda Taylor
The Release
Poetic X
Poet and A Jew
Critical MASS 12 Visual Works
MEET THE CRITICS
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 Green
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.