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    Summer 2025
    August 11-15, 2025
    Ongoing
    Led by Mark Mann with Joseph Henry and Clint Burnham and faculty member David Balzer.
    Residents: Benjamin Bruneau and Aaron Bogart
    Supported by FSCPH FSCPH .

    Overview

    Momus is now accepting applications for its Summer 2025 residency! Designed to reflect on the process of developing an art publication, incubator, or learning environment for art writing and criticism, this is a tuition-free online residency for 5 individuals who work as independent writers, editors, and publishers.

    This residency is specifically designed for practitioners without major institutional affiliations. By this we mean those individuals who are not currently employed by legacy media entities or major museums, galleries, or cultural and academic institutions. Applications will also be accepted from students currently enrolled in both traditional and alternatively designed programs in fields of study such as writing, art history, critical studies, and journalism. 
    The residency will take place online, with daily  2.5-hour sessions from August 11 through 15. Participation in this online residency will culminate in the opportunity to attend an in-person program in Montreal, being developed by Momus for 2026.

    Program

    Over the course of the week participants will be encouraged to share an independent project, practice, or ambition for workshopping with peers and faculty. The focus of this mentoring, networking, and learning event will be oriented around multi-modal and rhizomatic resource-sharing in an effort to think collaboratively and collectively about how infrastructures for art criticism are built and sustained.

    This residency won’t seek to reiterate the refrain “criticism is dead” but rather seek to ask participants the following: In what directions do our practices move? What tools are needed to become and remain sustainable? How do the publications and programs we build (continue to) reflect the communities in whom we are grounded and with whom we are in dialogue? 

    Through a combination of seminar style discussions and writing workshops, faculty will offer editorial guidance, resource-sharing, and coalition-building. We will address the recent shifts to our landscape, including conglomerations, closures, suppressions, and boycotts, but will largely focus on the regenerative and redirecting potential of the current sea-change moment in art criticism, especially for independent publishers and historically underrepresented writers. 

    Application requirements

    Submission:

    • Letter of intent (maximum 1 page) that outlines the editorial project you currently manage or the project that you hope to develop.
    • One published writing sample; a second writing sample is optional (the second sample may be published or unpublished). 
    • A 200-word bio

    Deadline: Friday 4 July  midnight EST

    About the Faculty

    Mark Mann

    Mark Mann is a writer and editor who specializes in longform narrative journalism. He has written feature stories for Toronto Life, The Walrus, Report on Business, Reader’s Digest, The Dance Current, Torontoist, Broadview and Maisonneuve, as well as essays about art and culture for Momus, The Toronto Star, and others. His writing about science and tech has appeared extensively on Motherboard. He has been shortlisted twice for the National Magazine Award. Mann is Associate Editor in Chief at Beside.

    Joseph Henry

    Joseph Henry is PhD Candidate in the art history program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he’s writing a dissertation on German Expressionism. He’s been a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Dia Art Foundation, and most recently, a Scholar-in-Residence at LACMA’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. In 2019 he received a DAAD One-Year Research Grant to study in Berlin.

    David Balzer

    David Balzer is a writer, editor and educator. He is the author of two books, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else, winner of ICA London’s Book of the Year, and the short-fiction collection Contrivances. In 2015, he won the International Award for Art Criticism. He has written about art and culture for the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, Frieze, Artforum, The Believer and others, and was editor-in-chief and co-publisher of Canadian Art from 2016 to 2019. He is currently working on his next nonfiction book in tkaronto/Toronto.

    Clint Burnham

    Clint Burnham is an art critic and professor. He teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University. His art writing has appeared as reviews and essays in fillip, Canadian Art, Artforum, Camera Austria, The Globe and Mail, Art Papers, Pyramid Power, and Flash Art, as well as in gallery catalogues in Rotterdam, Koln, Linz, Montreal, and Vancouver. In 2011 he curated, with Vancouver artist Lorna Brown, the Digital Natives public art project. He is currently writing a book about Slavoj Žižek and digital culture; other books include the novel Smoke Show (2005), the poetry collection The Benjamin Sonnets (2009), The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011); and he co-edited with Paul Budra, From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom (2012).

    About the Residents

    Benjamin Bruneau

    Benjamin Bruneau is an artist and writer based in Montreal.

    Aaron Bogart

    Aaron Bogart is an editor, writer, and consultant based in Berlin and New York.

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