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The Crit Collective
The Crit Collective (2023-2024)
The Crit Collective was an artist-led, participatory project designed to foster connection, conversation, and creative growth among artists in Gloucestershire and Cheltenham. Breaking away from traditional, institutional models, it provided a supportive, critique-based space for artists to share work, exchange ideas, and combat isolation.
Through free, monthly sessions, including Forest Crits in the Forest of Dean and gatherings at The Wilson in Cheltenham, the Collective created an accessible, collaborative environment where artists could experiment, reflect, and grow together. It wasn’t about selling work, it was about strengthening practice, building community, and making space for risk.
87a CRITS
87a CRITS is a pilot platform for UK based 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 studio in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Each session offers time and space to present work, reflect on process, and enter into rich discussion with peers. 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.
