Learning to Love Criticism

This image artistically and effectively plays on homophones to illustrate “Learning to Love Criticism,” a The Times Opinion article about women in the workplace, published September 28, 2014. The image is part of our collection of editorial illustrations being offered for the first time ever to the public as unframed or framed fine-art prints.

Illustrations have played an instrumental role in The Times’s journalistic legacy since December 11, 1861, when we published our first drawings – front page cartoons of James Gordon Bennett, rival publisher of The Herald. Today, The Times commissions thousands of original illustrations from freelance artists around the world. Artists, each with a distinct approach and personality, enhance stories with thought-provoking images that enrich the reading experience.

This illustration is by Keetra Dean Dixon, a designer whose work inhabits diverse terrain, including lettering, objects and experiential installations. She leverages emergent technologies and process-focused making in her playful exploration of the fallibility of communication, human connection and the creative process. Her work has earned a U.S. Presidential Award, a place in the permanent design collection at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an Art Directors Club Young Gun Award. She has acted as design director for installations featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale and has shown at the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Her featured speaking credits include the Type Directors Club in New York and the national American Institute of Graphic Arts Design Conference. She currently splits her time between U.S. coasts, working in New England and rural Alaska.