Around 2008 Mary Louise Schumacher started keeping track of the number of full-time art critics getting the ax as newspapers around the country were downsizing. A few years later, Schumacher, then the art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, began work on a documentary. In 2018 she became part of the story.
“One day I was called into the editor’s office and told my job would be cut,” she says in Out of the Picture, which is screening April 5 at the Chazen. “It was the most predictable thing in the world. One more place without a full-time critic.”
With her new freedom, she began working on the film full time. During the COVID pandemic she traveled the country, camping out in her Volkswagen Beetle and showering at truck stops.
One of the first art critics she interviews is Jen Graves from The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newsweekly. Graves becomes frustrated when asked to take on more general writing and administrative duties. “I was a finalist for the Pulitzer [for criticism] and they wanted me to do less writing,” she says in the film. Graves resigns in 2017 and Schumacher’s cameras are rolling when she cleans out her office one night, her husband and young child in tow. “He really gets it,” Graves quips when her son starts wailing.
But Schumacher’s film is not just about the loss of traditional arts critics. The film is forward looking, shining a light on critics who translate the experience of art for others in less conventional ways.
The film follows Jeneé Osterheldt, a culture columnist at the Boston Globe, as she visits the Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd was killed in 2020 and asks one of the muralists at work, “Does art help us in memory and mourning?” The “constant memorial site” and “24-hour vigil,” he says, provided a “huge opportunity for everyone to express themselves.” Osterheldt makes no attempt to stand apart from the crowd, joining in the chants of “I can’t breathe.” Later she tells Schumacher that she and other Black journalists do not have the luxury to process what they are reporting on. “We’re not just observing it like the rest of the world…we’re also living it and that’s a different type of grief.”
Schumacher asks big questions in the film: What does it mean to write about art? How is the role of art changing? How is technology changing us? Who will do this work now that arts writing is no longer a sustainable profession?
After resigning from The Stranger, Graves takes a job as a janitor. While cleaning one night, she notes the upside of the work: “There is no debate about how to practice journalism in the digital age in this bathroom.”
[Judith Davidoff will interview Schumacher after the screening.]
See more of our 2024 Wisconsin Film Fest coverage here.
