Chicago
Critic’s
Table
The Chicago Critic’s Table is a paid incubator for emerging Chicago cultural critics hosted by Arts + Public Life and funded by the Mellon Foundation.
APL seeks to support new and inclusive communities of critics working both within and beyond the academy. By connecting our cohort to each other and to the broader network of Chicago’s arts and culture scene, we hope to seed new collaborations with artists, critics, and audiences, and create new convenings and communities.
The sustainability of the arts in our communities requires that we attend to the physical and social life of art beyond its immediate production by also tending to its reception and circulation. By supporting a new generation of critics, we also seek to shape the work and careers of local artists, expand what we consider criticism and who we consider critics, and help connect audiences to new work.
photo by Jovan Landry
Chicago Critic’s Table offers emerging critics the opportunity to build an enduring network of colleagues working in a range of media, methods, and platforms in order to support and experiment with each other as they continue to develop their voice, practice, and audience with an emphasis on local critical scenes, history, and the work of Black and Brown artists.
Participants will:
Learn from other local critics.
Consider the art and ethics of criticism itself as a practice.
Consider the many voices and modalities criticism can take.
Experience local work together.
Engage with artists, audiences, and artistic work at Arts + Public Life.
Propose public talk-backs and critical conversations.
Incubate collaborative critical projects with participants, faculty, and artists.
Goals
Support and incubate new and emerging critical talent in Chicago.
Broaden who gets called a critic and what gets labeled as criticism, and create more dynamic modes of critical engagement.
Create new kinds of critical communities that break down silos of identity, genre, and medium.
Use criticism to broaden the audience for South Side artists and cultural scenes, and to create new types of critical audiences.
2027 Chicago Critic’s Table Open Call
Applications Opens October 1, 2026
“I am so grateful to have been a part of the inaugural cohort for Chicago Critic’s Table. Being in community with people with diverse interests across arts and culture and discussing the joys and difficulties around the craft of criticism is incredibly needed today as we move across an ever-changing mediascape. Chicago is such a rich cultural site and programs like this illustrate how necessary it is to document the present as much as the past and ensure that resources are available to a current generation of artists, scholars, thinkers, and writers who take on this critical work. ”
Meet Adrienne Brown +Tempestt Hazel
2027 Chicago Critic’s Table Leads
ADRIENNE BROWN is a Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and the Director of Arts + Public Life, a hub for artistic exploration, expression, and exchange that centers people of color and fosters neighborhood vibrancy on Chicago’s South Side. She is co-editor with Valerie Smith of the volume Race and Real Estate (2015) and the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, published by Stanford University Press in 2024.
TEMPESTT HAZEL is a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a collective of editors, writers, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who have published and produced collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in the Midwest since 2010. Across her practices and through Sixty, Tempestt has worked alongside artists, organizers, grantmakers, and cultural workers to explore solidarity economies, cooperative models, archival practice, future canon creation, and systems change in and through the arts.
An especially cherished moment for Tempestt was when she received the 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists, which was the result of a nomination by archivists and members of The Blackivists.
Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, spent several years in the California Bay Area, and has called Chicago her second home for over 13 years.
Bri Robinson (they/them), Cortlyn Kelly (she/her/any), Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel (she/they), Maria Khwaja (she/her), Jen Torwudzo-Stroh (she/her), Felicia Holman (she/her)
“The second cohort of APL’s Chicago Critics’ Table was the Southside-based North star of my 2025, and I’m forever grateful. As I continue navigation of my creative recalibration, I savor the genuine fellowship and support I experienced in this intimate cohort. Conceived by Adrienne Brown / facilitated by Tempestt Hazel and comprised of seven dynamic writers from myriad creative environs and practices, CCT 2025 was an interdisciplinary / intergenerational salve for my exasperated artistic spirit. I sincerely look forward to welcoming future CCT fellows into our expansive APL community.”
Rikki Byrd (she/her), Meralis Alvarez-Morales (she/her), Regina Victor (pharaoh/they), Camille Bacon (she/they), Zaria El-Fil (she/they), Britt Julious (she/her)
“The Chicago Critic’s Table gave me the confidence that I needed to begin my writing career. The space provided the opportunity to discuss criticism, meet artists who desired for their work to be written about, examine the role of criticism in the art world and society writ large. In addition, the Chicago Critic’s Table helped me develop a relationship with a journal that eventually yielded my first published work of criticism. Now, the realm of criticism is demystified and I have a firm sense of my writerly voice within Chicago criticism. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Chicago Critic’s Table and am excited to see the table provide more writers with the tools to confidently pursue their passion for criticism”