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Critical Review Request

How to Ask a Critic to Review Your Exhibition (With Example)

Approaching a named critic or commissioning editor about a specific show. This is the one format on this list that is not a press release: it is a personal letter, it goes to one person, and sending it to a list is worse than not sending it.

The example

Luminous Threads, Galería Méndez, until 28 June

A note for consideration, with images attached

Dear Ana,

I read your piece on the Taller Textil retrospective in March, particularly the point about textile work being catalogued as anthropology rather than art. I am writing because a show we have open until 28 June sits directly on that question.

Maria Alvarez weaves with salvaged thread from three Rio Grande mills that closed between 1998 and 2012. The material is not a reference to the industry; it is the industry, recovered with the help of former mill employees. The mills' names are in the work. Alongside the weavings there is a series of graphite drawings that record the same loom patterns at one-to-one scale, which as far as I know has not been written about.

The show is nine works, in Madrid, until 28 June. I can arrange a quiet viewing outside opening hours, and Alvarez is in Madrid until 20 June and happy to talk. There is an essay by Inés Cardoso drawing on the Piedras Negras dye ledgers, which I can send.

No obligation at all, and I will not chase. If it is useful I can send installation images.

Best wishes, Elena

Send to one named critic. Never to a list.

Attach two or three images, not a folder.

Follow up once, after two weeks, or not at all.

Every artist, gallery and institution in this example is invented.

Why it works

Prove you read them

The first line refers to a specific piece and a specific argument in it. Critics receive hundreds of releases from people who have plainly never read a word they have written, and this single line separates you from all of them.

Say what has not been written about

Critics are looking for the piece nobody else can write. Pointing at the drawings, and saying plainly that they have not been covered, hands them an angle.

Remove the pressure explicitly

Saying you will not chase is unusual enough to be memorable, and it means the next approach is welcome rather than dreaded. Then honour it.

It is a letter, so write like one

First person, a greeting, a signature. The moment it reads like a release forwarded to one person, it is one.

Conventions
  • One recipient. Address them by name.
  • Reference something specific they have written.
  • State the closing date early. Critics work to deadlines.
  • Offer access: a quiet viewing, the artist, the essay.
  • Attach two or three images, not an archive.
  • Keep it under 250 words.
What gets it deleted
  • BCC to a list of critics. It is visible in the headers and it ends the relationship.
  • Sending in the final week of a show.
  • Attaching a 40MB folder of images.
  • Following up more than once.
  • Calling the work important, major or groundbreaking. Let them decide.
Write yours

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