FILTER PHOTO CRITIQUE GROUP
Join Filter Photo Executive Director, Erin Hoyt, for an online critique group that will focus on project development. The group will meet once a month over the course of six months and every other session Erin will be joined by a special guest reviewer! Richard Renaldi will join the November session, Rania Matar will join the January session, and Asha Iman Veal will join the March session.
This will be a great opportunity to focus on a specific body of work and receive critical feedback in a supportive environment. In addition to sharing work, the group will discuss project development more broadly, as well as strategies for preparing work for exhibiting and publishing. Conversations will be tailored to the group’s interests and needs for advancing their artistic practice, and how to best move a project forward to completion.
This critique group is ideal for emerging photographers, recent graduates, new practitioners, and/or those making a shift from commercial to fine art work. The focus will be on developing a critical dialog and establishing good self-evaluation skills, in addition to editing and sequencing a series of photographs.
Participants should plan to focus on a single body of work for the duration of the sessions and should be prepared to screen share their work during each session.
This critique is limited to 12 participants, with a limited number of student spots available on a first come, first serve basis.
If you’re attending the 2024 Filter Photo Festival, join us at the Columbia College Student Center on Saturday September 21st for a Meet & Greet to meet your fellow participants before the group officially begins in October!
Teacher Bios
Erin Hoyt is an arts administrator specializing in contemporary photography. She is currently the Executive Director of Filter Photo, a non-profit arts organization based in Chicago that focuses on professional development practices for fine art and documentary photographers. At Filter, Erin manages an ongoing series of exhibitions, artist lectures, professional development workshops, and portfolio reviews. She is also an avid collector of contemporary photography and participates in national and international conferences including Paris Photo, AIPAD, & Art Basel, and has served as a reviewer for Chico Reviews and Atlanta Photography Group.
Richard Renaldi (joining the November session) was born in Chicago in 1968. He received a BFA in photography from New York University in 1990. He is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York and Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin. Five monographs of his work have been published, including Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006); Fall River Boys (Charles Lane Press, 2009); Touching Strangers (Aperture, 2014); Manhattan Sunday (Aperture, 2016); I Want Your Love (Super Labo, 2018). He was the recipient of a 2015 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Rania Matar (joining the January session), was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums. Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, Outwin Portrait Competition with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC, and Taylor Wessing Prize with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Matar published four books: SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009. She is working on her upcoming book: “50 Years Later: Where Do I Go?”, 2026
Asha Iman Veal (joining the March session) is a curator of interdisciplinary contemporary art at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include LOVE: Still Not the Lesser (MoCP, 2023), Beautiful Diaspora / You Are Not the Lesser Part (MoCP, 2022), and RAISIN (vol. 1) (Chicago Architecture Biennial 2021). She has curated additional large-scale exhibitions for the MoCP, Hyde Park Art Center, MSU Eli, and Edythe Broad Art Museum by Zaha Hadid, among others.
Veal is frequently invited as a guest lecturer or panelist, serves as a distinguished jury reviewer for awards and residencies, and is invited as a portfolio reviewer or crit panelist at various cultural institutions, both local and international. She also serves on the board of Filter Photo (Chicago) and was recently a board member of Experimental Sound Studio and Audible Gallery. She is active in the ORACLE Conference of International Photography Curators, as well as the Independent Curators International – Curatorial Forum and Chicago Assembly (2023 cohorts). Additionally, she bridges interdisciplinary relationships between the arts, government, corporate, and nonprofit sectors through her role as a Senior Fellow of Humanity in Action (EU/UK/US), member of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Network (Global Table), and as a Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Emerging Leader. Veal holds a BA from New York University Gallatin School, an MFA from The New School, and an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.