As the arts and architecture critic at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Mary Louise Schumacher wondered why there were fewer and fewer full-time critics. This question begot larger questions about the changing state of art and media in the digital age. So, in 2010, she began directing a documentary following art critics around the country. Last year, she completed that film, titled Out of the Picture.
During that time span, Schumacher led a survey of 327 art critics as the 2017 Arts & Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, digging into their values, anxieties and hope for the future of criticism. She also lost her job of 18 years as the Journal Sentinel‘s art critic in 2019, herself becoming part of the film’s story.
In a conversation with Milwaukee Magazine, Schumacher talked about making Out of the Picture, why she thinks local arts media is essential and what makes her hopeful for the field’s future.
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What inspired you to start making this film?
About a dozen years ago, I was on staff at the local newspaper and just noticed that art critics were losing their jobs all over the country, and that there wasn’t a lot of discussion about it … I think my journalistic gut kicked in, and I felt like there was a story there to be told.
So, I ended up having a conversation with my friend Mark (Escribano) at the Riverwest Co-Op one weekend morning, and we came up with this idea of making a film – turning our cameras on the writers we cared about to see what would happen to them, and to humanize the quiet labors of our critics, which are very misunderstood and not well-known … We followed a lot of writers over the course of those years. What we did not expect was that pretty much everything about art and media would change during that time.
How did you decide on the five main subjects you followed?
My first criteria in terms of who I wanted to talk to were writers that I cared about myself and that I wanted to learn from. In the very beginning, I was trying to learn about a field that was collapsing as I was coming into it, so it was research not only for this project, but for myself.
And beyond that, people who were just able to be who they are with a camera running. The five writers that became the focus of the film are certainly people who are able to be fully themselves. And they were also writers that pointed a way forward, too. They are remarkable, change-making writers who I think will inspire the next generation of critics.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the current media landscape, but the film also seems to make a point about the positive ways arts criticism is changing. What are those things that you saw in your subjects?
We are in this moment where so much of media has been decimated, and there’s no guarantee of the future. And yet, our film is a hopeful film in many ways, and one thing that gives me hope is the way in which some of these writers think about the work that they do. … They’re thinking about all the things that human beings care about today, and what artists have to say to those issues. So, instead of being a group of writers who are writing for an audience who’s very specifically interested in culture, these are writers who are at the center of our most important conversations and are taking on a different role within their media organizations as a result.
After working on the film for all that time, what made you realize it was complete?
Having my own position eliminated in 2019 was certainly a contributing factor to how and when the film ended. I didn’t really expect to become part of the story of the film itself, but it allowed me the free rein to finish the film. I could give it my full focus.
That meant going back to each of our primary subjects, spending considerable time with them, and bringing those stories in for a landing with great intention … There were moments, to be candid, where we had to wait for things to unfold with some of our subjects. That was part of the process as well – we knew we weren’t done with some of our stories, and we had to kind of wait for things to reach a natural conclusion.
A lot of national arts coverage is centered in larger cities like New York and L.A. How did your experience covering art in a place like Milwaukee shape this film?
Milwaukee is in this film in more ways than I could recount. Every artist I’ve ever talked to, every editor I’ve ever worked with, is somehow in this film. It’s a film that asks very big questions about large issues facing the art world and media nationally. But it is my point of view, and that’s a very Milwaukee-based point of view.
What I’m conscious of, having spent 18 years writing about art in Milwaukee, is that there are a lot of places across the country today where no one is paying attention to what artists do. What does it mean when discussion ends up being centered in the proving grounds of the art world – the galleries in New York, Berlin and L.A. – and where there isn’t discussion happening in places like Milwaukee, Oklahoma City, Detroit and Seattle? … I do think those communities and those artists deserve people who just show up and bear witness to that activity. It contributes so much for a community’s sense of itself to understand what it is that artists are doing in that place.
How would you describe the role of an art critic?
Well, first I would say to people who have curiosity about art but feel a little intimidated by it, or aren’t exactly sure what to expect of contemporary art, that art does have mystery to it. And it feels that way for all of us, no matter how knowledgeable we are. It also connects us to human experience unlike anything else on Earth.
We’re in this really disorienting time, right? And we’re facing any number of existential threats as a planet with climate change, segregation in the City of Milwaukee, with our polarized political landscape. And artists are there to help us understand who we are and where we’re going. What the critic does is help us see who they are, where they are, what they’re doing. Critics can be a translator who unlocks their world for the rest of us.
And then the question is, what happens when you just don’t have that? … Was (having art critics) really just for a small group of readers? Can we really justify that it didn’t matter to the larger community, or does it? And I, of course, would argue that it does.
Out of the Picture screens April 12, 13 and 24 at the 2024 Milwaukee Film Festival.
