C Mag
Program information
C New Critics Award 2023
Winner will be published in issue 156
2022 C New Critics Award Winner
Shaneela Boodoo's review of "begin to be; have become" (2022) will be published in C153 “Chinatown” (Winter 2023).
In her review of "begin to be; have become" (2022), a group exhibition at TakeHome BIPOC Arts House in Winnipeg, Shaneela Boodoo generously reflects on the exhibition's engagement with world-structuring categories like race, gender, memory, sexuality, and labour. Through evocative prose, readers access lush descriptions of the work from the unique vantage point of Boodoo's curious and attentive gaze: a flicker of a candle, the way sunlight is filtered through fibres of suspended textiles. Boodoo offers readers a kind of ekphrastic art writing concerned with form. Her interpretive moves are consciously, beautifully, descriptive, in order to broach the new practices of looking called for by the exhibition's exploration of "what we [can] become outside of colonial violence."
Now in its 14th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. This program gives C Magazine the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work by the annual deadline. The winner receives a financial award, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the forthcoming issue of C Magazine, and a two-year subscription. All participants receive a one-year subscription.
Submissions
For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of art criticism in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals or magazines. The competition is open to anyone residing in Canada, regardless of citizenship status, and to Canadians living abroad.
Submissions are assessed by C Magazine editors and external jurors, announced each year. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators.
Submission deadlines vary from year to year. Exhibition and performance reviews are expected to address recent work. Timeframes are specified each year (2023 submissions will have to address work that occurred no earlier than January 1, 2023). Reviews of book and moving image work must address work made in the past two years.
Submissions are restricted to one 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. More information for writers is available on our Write for Us page.