Paul Schmelzer. Photo: Bobby Rogers
Hello!
I’m a Minneapolis-based writer, editor, and content strategist interested most in the intersection of art and social change. By day, I’m the editor of the Carleton College Voice, the award-winning magazine of the Northfield, Minn.–based liberal arts college. On the side, I help artists with their communication needs, write about arts and culture, and do the occasional corporate editorial or naming gig.
From 2011 to 2020, I was founding editor of the Walker Art Center’s “gamechanging” homepage and its more recent incarnation as the Walker Reader magazine. In this role, I led online editorial strategy, championing its potential for engaging diverse audiences, catalyzing dialogue, and embracing the kind of brave questioning at the heart of some of the best contemporary art. (For more of my thinking, read my interviews with the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes and museum technologist Seb Chan, listen to AAM’s Museopunks podcast, or check out my contribution to Art in America’s digital museums issue). Favorite projects include creating Soundboard, a multi-author interface that aimed to address urgent questions in art and culture; the hybrid print/digital Artist Op-Eds; and the interview series Lowercase P: Artists & Politics; among others. And in 2015, I was the chief organizer and co-emcee of the lauded international conference, Superscript: Arts Journalism & Criticism in a Digital Age.
As an editor, I believe in language that is compelling, clear, accessible, and equitable. Projects range from serving as production editor on Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, Coco Fusco’s first monograph, to be published in October 2023 by Thames & Hudson, to editing interviews for Trieste, the catalogue for artist/curator Jay Heikes’s multi-venue 2014 exhibition. From 2007 to 2011, I was editor of the Minnesota Independent (I was also its award-winning media writer) and, from 2010 to 2011, managing editor of its DC-based parent, the nonprofit American Independent News Network. From 2003 to 2005, I was a contributing editor at Adbusters magazine.
As a writer, I’ve contributed more than 350 pieces to publications including Adbusters, Art21, artforum.com, British Heritage, The Progressive, Hyperallergic, Ode Magazine, Raw Vision, and Utne Reader, and books including the Royal Society of Arts’s Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and Formist’s Ficciones Typografika 1642. In 2020, I partnered with writer and curator Nicole J. Caruth to launch The Ostracon, a writing platform supported by a 2019 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
As a strategist, my clients range from the McKnight Foundation to Land O’ Lakes, the Helsinki art space PUBLICS to the National Performance Network. Key projects include naming a new Twin Cities initiative that’ll invest $2B in BIPOC enterprises in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, creating stories about rural vibrancy and sustainability for Land O’ Lakes, and an ongoing gig with the National Gallery of Art. (For the latest on what I’ve been up to, visit my news section.)
Outside of work, I dabble in artmaking, including my long-running conceptual art project Signifier, Signed, in which I ask celebrities, “Will you sign my autograph?”
Want to read the official version? Download my CV.
Want to work together? Let's get in touch!
Selected Press
“A staff reorganization at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has resulted in the closing of its online magazine, the Walker Reader. That is unfortunate. The site, led by journalist Paul Schmelzer, produced interesting arts coverage in ways that were topical without being self-promotional, featuring contributions by important art world figures such as Jack Whitten, Hans Haacke, Taylor Renee Aldridge and Jessica Lynne. I’ve always thought of it as a model for what museums might do to support arts writing at a time when media is shriveling. I’m sorry to see it go.”
—Carolina Miranda, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 5, 2020
“The museum’s Web site, walkerart.org, has also responded to the groundswell of protest with swift sensitivity, publishing fresh commissions—a meditation on Floyd and black utopianism by the young Minneapolis poet and educator Keno Evol—and deep cuts from its archive, including video of an illuminating conversation, from 2005, between the poet Elizabeth Alexander and the painter Kerry James Marshall.”
—Andrea Scott, The New Yorker, June 2020
“The site [walkerart.org] is a networked treasure house, where its collection and exhibition displays mingle with a panoply of artistic and art-related content, like the Walker Reader, an editorial arm of the museum that features debates on Indigenous art, or on how museums respond to the #MeToo movement. Treating the digital museum as coequal to the physical museum means you can be nimble when disaster strikes.”
—Jason Farago, New York Times, April 23, 2020
“It is through inclusive dialogue, such as the Walker’s Roundtable [“How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?”], that museums can facilitate genuine connections between indigenous culture and contemporary exhibits of history.”
"I think of Paul Schmelzer and the Walker Reader as being really aligned, I find a lot of creative inspiration from the pieces they commission."
—Marisa Mazria Katz, SFMOMA's OpenSpace, Mar. 9, 2017
"The Walker's new site is helmed by Paul Schmelzer, who has long run the excellent Eyeteeth blog. If anyone can figure out how to turn The Walker's website into an art mag frontend for the museum's collection, Schmelzer can."
—Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, Dec. 5, 2011
"Schmelzer is an award-winning journalist who has worked at both the local and national levels. In part because of Schmelzer, no American art museum is more prepared to produce journalism than is the Walker."
—Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes, Dec. 5, 2011
More Media Mentions
“A Closer Look at Art’s Peripheries,” Shiv Kotecha, creative-capital.org, Mar. 1, 2021.
“The Hard-Hit Arts Sector Is Facing a Brain Drain as Ambitious Workers Seek Greener Pastures,” Zachary Small, Artnet News, Sept. 15, 2020.
“Walker Art Center Staff Reorganization Results in End of Museum’s Closely Followed Digital Magazine,” Alex Greenberger, ARTnews, Sept. 2, 2020.
“Walker Art Center Creates, Cuts Jobs in Initiative to Rethink Public Engagement,” Artforum, Sept. 2. 2020.
“Staff shakeup at Walker Art Center aims to raise its 'public voice,'“ Jenna Ross, Star Tribune, Sept. 1, 2020.
“Warhol Foundation Writer Grants Go to Aruna D’Souza, Jillian Steinhauer, More,” Tessa Solomon, ARTnews, Dec. 4, 2019.
“38 Artists, Curators, and Editors Voice Support for Former Queens Museum Director Laura Raicovich in Open Letter,” ARTnews, Feb. 1, 2018.
"In Ways We Have Yet to Imagine: The Final Editor’s Letter," Marisa Mazria Katz, Creative Time Reports, Mar. 1, 2017.
“In the Triangle of Fan Culture, Comedy, and Conceptual Art: Ben Davis on Signifier, Signed,” March 17, 2017.
"What is the role of the digital-age arts critic? Superscript conference hopes for answers," Chris Ip, Columbia Journalism Review, May 19, 2015
“Museums as Media Organizations,” Museopunks podcast, guest, episode 06, September 2013.
"Artists insist on puncturing the bubble," Modern Art Notes, Oct. 23, 2012.
"The museum website as newspaper: An interview with Walker Art Center," Seb Chan, Fresh & New, Dec. 2, 2011.
"The Walker’s new website is an earthshaking game-changer," Museum Nerd, Dec. 2, 2011.
“Louis Vuitton sues artist, again,” Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing, Mar. 28, 2011.
“Collecting Tears as an Act of Love,” Utne, Jeff Severns Guntzel, July 27, 2009.
“Designing Obama” (video), moderator and presenter on the history of political campaign graphic design, with Obama campaign designers Sol Sender and Scott Thomas, Walker Art Center, May 13, 2009.
"Can art still play a subversive role in society?" Steve Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 29, 2006.