This January, I joined those viewing Mary Louise Schumacher’s extraordinary film, Out of the Picture, at the Portland Museum of Art. Out of the Picture answers mourning with energy for renewal. Elegiac, investigative, and defiant, Schumacher’s film holds up a mirror to a society that increasingly rejects the idea that art matters, matters particularly as part of the public square, a cornerstone of political discourse that is for everyone, not owned by propaganda interests. While the film’s narrative and thematic focus concerns art writing, the steep collapse of institutional support for full-time art critics, the underlayment of the question of whether art writing matters, is the foundation of how art can matter now. Now, when late-stage capitalism has distorted what it means to pay attention. Now, when the specter of the new administration twists to break the fragile social protections that have held America since the New Deal.
Art writing is an intrinsic part of art. To see art and say nothing about it, communally, is to remove art from public discourse. Schumacher’s film, which was created over nearly fifteen years as she filmed and interviewed a small set of art writers, frames the conversation of writing about art, subtly pulling viewers into the discourse. My discussion of the film here is deeply truncated, but I want to indicate what an important film Out of the Picture is for our time now. Art critic Jen Graves is an evocative presence in the film; for years a full-time art writer for Seattle’s The Stranger, Graves left her job in 2017 under pressure to shorten, speed up, and make shallow her art writing, in response to the social media immersive environment of clickbait. Graves ends up cleaning offices for a living—a scene Schumacher evocatively films—and years later still mourns the loss. The film builds beautifully the unusual situation that once held in Seattle with Sheila Farr, Regina Hackett, and Graves all working as full-time art critics in that city. The women’s spliced conversation gives us a potent sense of why art writers in place, writing locally about local art, is so valuable. Former Los Angeles Times art critic, Carolina Miranda, is a delightful presence in the film, illuminating why an art critic seeking out local arts is at the core of our collective need for art writing. Out of the Picture emphasizes Hrag Vartanian, whose Hyperallergic, the brilliant online art blog that houses art critics such as Seph Rodney (another luminous focus of the film), is showcased for its ability to maintain public dialogue around art in the attention economy. And yet, Hyperallergic is not a local zine, even as the relationship between art writers and the cities in which they write is a focal point of Schumacher’s film. Out of the Picture subtly makes the persuasive point that art as a public need is a local phenomenon; cities need art writers, and communities need art writers. This relationship between art writing, art, and place is a key to the film that precisely mourns its erosion. The film’s presentation of Jenneé Osterheldt, the culture columnist for the Boston Globe, deepens this point as we are shown the importance of Osterheldt’s work for the Black community in Boston.
The mood of the film is at once gentle—Schumacher is friends with her fellow art writers portrayed in the film, and friendship is a tender and moving thread in the film—and also deeply mournful. As art writing becomes hollowed out by lack of funding for all but the tiny handful of full-time art critics still (in early 2025) writing for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, the cultural belief that art matters so much that we, as human beings, need to know about it, think about it, talk about it, read about it, is also implicitly sacrificed. It is this sacrifice of the idea that art saves us, that art is at the core of what it means to be human, that Out of the Picture presents as a kind of meta-critique of our general cultural drift into being content receivers, receiving content created responsively “for” us by algorithms and artificial intelligence, our attention constantly pushed. Art, the film implicitly contends, is not “content.” Art writing elucidates the intensity with which good art is anything but the predetermined product of the attention industry.
Art writing is not about clicks, it is about thinking, thinking through images (broadly meant). It enhances the effect of art and is its own art, as writers like Graves, Miranda, Osterheldt, and Rodney have shown. The film works towards its conclusion showcasing the eloquent Rodney as he quotes Sylvia Plath’s haunting poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” ending with a line evoking the rare descent of the angel—the luminous place where the world takes a form of grace. The “rare, random descent” of what art gives us, a stillness, a feeling of the world reforming itself around the image (or act or voice or written word), not only so that the tedium of depression (which Plath was battling when she wrote the poem) but also the horror of what we humanly do (like electing the unthinkable to govern us) pauses and we can contemplate, think, understand with wholeness where and who we are.
The film’s poignancy and pathos coheres with my mood. Just before Christmas this year, I started having overwhelming feelings of anxiety and grief. The process of working back to a place of being able to engage at least the small parameters of life at the core of steadiness—enjoying my family, writing as if my work mattered, sleeping, and eating—is the hardest of jobs. A few days after viewing Out of the Picture, I went back to the museum seeking calm. I found there, in Maya Tihtiyas Attean’s (Penobscot) Atuwoskonikehsuwok (forest spirits), a sizeable gelatin silver print, something that held still in me. The trees in Atuwoskonikehsuwok (forest spirits) almost appear layered as they retreat and come towards us, as if they were made of one silver thread looping them to the earth, the sky, the light that the camera captures. Part of Attean’s Does the Land Remember? series, the image conveys a palpable sense of survival in the space of inherited trauma. The suggestion of a path opens in the image’s foreground even as the trees close quickly and densely toward the vanishing point. The luminous silver tones of the piece suggest something like Plath’s “rare, random descent” of the spirit, as indeed Attean’s title evokes. The photograph is a solarized print, a process that involves using brief light in the darkroom to reverse tones, making the sky dark and the trees brilliant silver, an eerie homeyness to the vista. It matters that the photograph is of a forest not too far away from this museum, a forest in that place we now call Maine.
Maya Tihtiyas Attean, Pokotahqewiye, solarized print.
It matters that the artist lives here. It seems even to matter that I, viewing the art, live here. The localness of this art is the reason I saw it, accidentally, walking in because it was cold out and I’d been walking for a long time (I’m also a member of the Portland Museum of Art, making it financially reasonable to stop in just for the sake of breathing). It matters that the artist is an Indigenous woman, whose ancestry is from here, from this place, in ways that no settler can be. It matters that in this place Attean creates art about the land’s wounding trauma of genocidal colonization. Attean’s Atuwoskonikehsuwok (forest spirits) asks us to breathe. It is a solemn image, articulating the trauma our culture inflicts on the earth, establishing also the forest’s ability to persist and survive even in the confines of racial capitalism. Attean’s Pokotahqewiye (it echoes), also shown in the Portland exhibit, shows a spectral figure of the photographer climbing a large rock outcropping, with long exposure making the figure look diaphanous, ghostly. The “it” of the echo is the rock—the land itself absorbing and remembering the trauma of colonization—but also light echoes. Light’s echo creates photography. The urge to reencounter trauma to heal is palpable in these images. The landscape wounded, intensely altered by colonization in these photographs is the place we call Maine. Showing these images in Maine is different from showing them anywhere else. Local art anchors place-based conversations, acknowledging and taking responsibility for shared history.
Can art save us? Possibly only if we can write and read about it, openly, locally, believing and respecting that it matters. Schumacher’s film, Out of the Picture—the title referencing the removal of art writers from the American cultural landscape—tells us that art writing is a kind of breathing. Art writing opens conversation around art in ways that are fundamental to the work of being human. Art writing brings us to art and brings us deeper into art. In the months and years to come, we may find that we need this.
Maya Tihtiyas Attean, Atuwoskonikehsuwok, gelatin silver print.