Now in its 14th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help identify, develop, and promote the work of emerging art critics. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work, by May 30, 2023. The winner will receive $750, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the Winter issue of C Magazine, and a two-year subscription. All participants will receive a one-year subscription.

For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of writing in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals and magazines. The competition is open to anyone residing in Canada, regardless of citizenship status, and to Canadians living abroad.

Exhibition and performance reviews must address work that occurred no earlier than January 1, 2023, whereas book and moving image work reviews must address work made in the past two years. See our submissions page for more information for writers.

One submission per person. Upload your submission here at award-submission.cmagazine.com. Mail or fax submissions will not be accepted. Please let us know of any accommodation we may provide during the application process. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. If you have questions please direct them to editor@cmagazine.com

Submissions will be assessed by Joy Xiang, Editor at C Magazine, and two external jurors: Tiana Reid and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism, she has also spent several years doing editorial work at academic journals, including Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in BOMB, C Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse, and alongside exhibitions and artist projects at The Bows, Centre Clark, Franz Kaka, Mercer Union, SFU Galleries, Susan Hobbs Gallery, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks include Mayonnaise and Drawings on Yellow Paper (with Katie Lyle). She is the Art Editor of The Capilano Review, a West Coast journal of experimental art and poetics, and publishes DIY books by emerging artists and writers under the small press Blank Cheque.

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2023 C New Critics Award winner: Francesca Bennett, for her review of Woojae Kim’s exhibition “With a heart that sings the stars, I will love all things dying,” to be published in C156 "Craft" (Winter 2024).

Francesca Bennett has supported artists' practices on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations since 2003. Informed by her work in collections, archives, and administration, her curatorial and writing practices are centred on the extension of personal transformative encounters with objects toward their multitude of social relations.

We would also like to congratulate Julia Trojanowski, who was chosen by the jury for Honourable Mention. Trojanowski’s review of “Ominous Chaos” (Centre A, 8 April to 3 June 2023), an exhibition curated by Bahar Mohazabnia and featuring artists Homa Khosravi and Marzieh Mosaverzadeh.

More information