87a CRITS

87a CRITS is a new, self-initiated pilot platform for contemporary artists who want to explore their practice through critique, conversation, and shared enquiry. It’s a space for challenge and experimentation. This is for artists who are serious about their work, hungry for dialogue, and ready to connect outside of institutions, ego, or art world performance.

Taking place monthly from September 2025 to February 2026, 87a CRITS invites participants to engage in artist-led critique sessions hosted in a domestic studio-house setting in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Each session offers time and space to present work, reflect on process, and enter into rich discussion with peers. This is not a drop-in, not a networking event, and not a casual group share, it’s a focused, artist-built space for deeper thinking and material questioning.

The programme was founded by artist and educator Jo Hepburn as the next phase of The Crit Collective, a grassroots project exploring critical conversation for artists working outside the major cities. 87a CRITS builds on those foundations to foster a more sustained, deliberate approach to critique and artistic dialogue. It’s about pushing practice forward, interrogating what the work is doing in the world, and creating a local space for ambitious, experimental work that’s rooted in thought, risk, and process.

We welcome applications from artists at any stage of practice who are exploring urgent questions, experimental processes, and contemporary material thinking. You might be a recent graduate, a self-taught practitioner, or an artist with one foot inside academia and the other firmly outside. What matters is your ability to commit, contribute, and grow alongside others.

Participants should be prepared to attend every session, support others’ critiques as well as their own, and bring openness, generosity, and challenge to the room. When it’s your turn, you’ll install work in the space, collaborate with Jo on structuring the session, and receive direct, constructive responses to help propel your work forward. Between sessions, artists will be encouraged to stay in conversation and share readings, thoughts, and questions.

87a CRITS is free to join- no fees, no funding, no gatekeeping. Artists will need to cover their own travel and commit to the full duration of the programme. This is about building something artist-to-artist, from the ground up, with care, intent, and momentum.

If you’re working with urgency, innovation, and a desire to go deeper in your practice, and if you’ve been craving a space where honest, grounded conversation is the norm, 87a CRITS might be for you.

Full application info is available online.