Drawn from artist Jesse Darling’s keynote lecture at the “Have Some Imagination” conference at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art on the role of contemporary art education, artists and educators Kerry Downey and Agnes Walden use his phrase “gathering around the wound” to explore the fraught space of group critique (or “crit”) in art school. Darling incites the inherent vulnerability of receiving feedback as a student, and as trans artists, Downey and Walden similarly see “the wound” as the productive intersection between interior and sociopolitical life, where parts of ourselves go seen and unseen. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and frustration help students develop visual literacy and listening skills, alongside developing awareness of their desires with their work. Students navigate the affectively dense social space of discourse, toggling between their artistic intentions and collaborative meaning making. In between signal and noise, students and teachers potentiate possibilities for our future lives of artists.