From West to East: New rural series launches at the National Gallery of Art

As guest editor of the Midwest region of the just-published National Gallery of Art series “West to East,” I invited three rural writers to share their perspectives on how place shapes creativity—and contributed a writing of my own.

Called Back: On George Morrison, Land Acknowledgement, and Returning Home
Artist Andrea Carlson writes about the art of George Morrison and her return to Gichi Bitobig (Grand Marais), a landscape that influenced Morrison deeply. A member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, she parses what’s left out when we see didactic labels for Morrison’s art that leave out so much of the story.

An aerial view of Francis Xavier Church, the Chippewa City church George Morrison and his family attended. Photo: Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber

Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

Owner of Pied Beauty Farm and associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, Joshua Mabie looks at the ways artists like Grant Wood leveraged agrarian symbolism, unwittingly obscuring the reality of life for rural people. Fun fact: while the house in Wood’s American Gothic remains a tourist destination in Iowa, the red barn over the couple’s shoulder never existed: “[It] is a figment of Wood’s imagination, added to confirm the painting’s rural setting.”

A drone shot of Mabie’s Pied Beauty Farm in Stoughton, Wisconsin. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber

Iowa Artists Craft Complex Visions of the Rural

Matthew Fluharty, executive director of Art of the Rural, focuses on Grant Wood’s immersive Corn Room murals as a way to “understand how land, tradition, and personal experience have motivated rural, regional artists,” from Grant Wood to Timothy Wehrle, Laurel Nakadate, and Duane Slick.

Grant Wood’s immersive Corn Room Mural at the Sioux City Art Center. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber

For the fourth piece in the series, I contributed my own writing:

Potter Richard Bresnahan Navigates an “Eco-mutual” Future
For my profile, I visited the resident potter at my alma mater, St. John’s University, to hear about how his experience apprenticing with the Nakazato family’s master potters in Kyushu, Japan, in the 1970s influenced his hyperlocal, eco-friendly, and distinctly Minnesotan practice in Collegeville.

Richard Bresnahan in the St. John’s Abbey Arboretum, Collegeville, Minnesota. Photo: Jenn Ackermann and Tim Gruber.

The series is visually unified by the photography of Minneapolis-based studio Ackermann + Gruber, whose imagery grounds each story in the unique sense of place of these four rural environments. After hiring them for a Carleton College shoot and imagery for a Land O’Lakes project on rural vitality, this is my third time working with this husband and wife duo.

Looking for New Opportunities

After 18 years at the Walker Art Center, I’m exploring new work opportunities. On August 30, I received word that my position had been eliminated and the Walker Reader shut down indefinitely.

It was shocking and sad news, but I’m glad I can depart with genuine pride in how I served the institution, the field, and people who care about contemporary art. I’m grateful to Andrew Blauvelt, former Walker design director and head of the now-disbanded Audience Engagement and Communications department, for the vision to hire me back in 2011 (I’d worked at the Walker from 1998 to 2007 before leaving to be managing editor of the DC-based nonprofit Center for Independent Media) to edit the Walker homepage. The radical innovation he and design director Emmet Byrne engineered was in transforming the museum’s homepage into a content hub, one that forefronted not only stories that contextualized and raised visibility of Walker programs but also issues of import for, and outside of, contemporary art, thus, positioning the Walker as an arbiter and catalyst for conversations about culture. As I wrote in Art In America in 2016, the idea was to approach the Walker’s virtual and in-person visitors with equal value and respect, a notion recognized this spring by the New York Times’s Jason Farago; in naming the Walker website one of the world’s best art sites during pandemic, he called out Walker Reader and noted, “Treating the digital museum as coequal to the physical museum means you can be nimble when disaster strikes.”

That 2011 homepage was hailed as a game-changer in museum publishing. In 2017, a redesign greatly reduced content on the homepage and created Walker Reader as a magazine with less visibility but a more refined editorial perspective, fed by five disciplinary verticals. I was the sole dedicated staffer, supported by the Walker’s design and digital media departments. Despite few resources (my annual budget for all expenses never exceeded $23K), the Reader made a mark in the field and, I hope, in the lives of its contributors. I was committed to paying writers equitably, following WAGE’s fee calculator, and kept diversity—of thought, perspectives, identities, and artistic disciplines—in focus at all times. (Last fiscal year, 69 percent of commissioned writers identified as BIPOC; 54 percent identified as women, trans, or non-binary.)

In 2012, I asked Christophe Szpajdel—designer of logos for death metal bands like Sadistic Passage and Vomit of Torture and a featured artist in the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production—to create a Walker in his iconic style.

In 2012, I asked Christophe Szpajdel—designer of logos for death metal bands like Sadistic Passage and Vomit of Torture and a featured artist in the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production—to create a Walker in his iconic style.

I’m proud of platforms I conceived of and supported over the years, including Artist Op-Eds (featuring the voices of Naeem Mohaiemen and Hans Haacke, Gordon Hall, Jack Whitten, Sky Hopinka, Ana Tijoux, and others), Soundboard (a discussion interface that’s tackled tough topics from the ways museums might respond to sexual harassment claims against artists like Chuck Close to notions around indigenizing fashion and queering design pedagogy), and the ever-popular year-end list series, The Year According to… It’s been exciting in so many ways: interviewing Meredith Monk, editing Louise Erdrich, leading an artist talk with Postcommodity, working with Werner Herzog on a Trump-era addendum to his famed Minnesota Declaration on truth and fiction in documentary cinema, writing about local favorites like Erik Brandt and Piotr Szyhalski, and organizing and serving as conference co-emcee for Superscript: Arts Journalism & Criticism in a Digital Age. There are too many amazing experiences to share (popping to mind: chatting with Coco Fusco as a makeup artist transformed her into Dr. Zira from Planet of the Apes, asking the “Paul Rand of Metal” to create a black metal logo for the Walker, interviewing Thomas Hirschhorn inside his cardboard-and aluminum cave…)

I do believe that Walker Reader, and digital publishing more broadly, has been an important driver of the Walker’s reputation internationally, but it’s also been a meaningful tool for serving its local audiences—inviting local figures, and paying them, to share their perspectives on an array of topics, from Minneapolis poet Erin Sharkey’s response to PopeL’s Skin Set artworks and Twin Cities dancers responding to the annual Choreographers’ Evening showcase to activist and politician Andrea Jenkins’s thoughts on how documentary practices can elevate transgender voices. As cultural institutions wrestle with questions of relevance, purpose, relationship with community, and real equity, I hope the Walker renews its commitment to digital publishing as a valuable tool.

While I obsessively tracked metrics on the “success” of Walker Reader content—citations, traffic, time on site, social media shares, comments, and links, etc.—one local response remains among the most meaningful to me. Following the controversies over Sam Durant’s Scaffold and an exhibition of art by Jimmie Durham, an artist whose Cherokee heritage has been challenged, I invited artist Dyani White Hawk Polk to convene an online roundtable. Titled "How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?," Dyani led a substantive, no-holds-barred discussion with Native artists and curators on ways to make a more inclusive art world, covering everything from the need for Native scholars and critics to factors related to education and the art market. I’m pleased that the discussion, lengthy as it is, stands as an online resource for years to come. Further, it was an honor to see the project referenced at length in Susan L. Allen and Amy B. Weisgram Engstrom's piece for the Mitchell Hamline Law Review, “Inclusivity in Contemporary Art: Assessing the Walker’s Scaffold Controversy” (pdf, see p. 188), which noted, “It is through inclusive dialogue, such as the Walker’s Roundtable, that museums can facilitate genuine connections between indigenous culture and contemporary exhibits of history.” Here’s hoping the Walker renews its commitment to this kind of engagement—and that there’s another employer out there who already sees its value and would welcome me to help tell stories that matter.

I’d love to bring the passion and thinking that guided these projects to a new project or employer. Is your art center, museum, company, or nonprofit hiring a storyteller, editor, or content strategist? Let me know.

Thanks for all the journalists and peers who’ve had kind words to say about my work at the Walker. A sampling:

Carolina Miranda, “Essential Arts,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 5, 2020:

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.

Matthew Newton, Director of Publishing, The Andy Warhol Museum, Twitter, Sept. 4, 2020:

When it was announced this week that @walkermag would be shuttered amid restructuring at @walkerartcenter, it felt like a gut punch, at least to those of us familiar with the Reader and the gold standard it had set for journalism pub'd by an art museum.

When I was hired at @cmoa back in 2014, and tasked with making the museum's blog a more authoritative publishing platform, @walkermag offered a north star. And when I reached out to @iteeth, the Reader's longtime editor, he was generous with his time and insights.

Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and co-founder of Art + Museum Transparency, Instagram, Sept. 3, 2020:

When I think of standards and benchmarks in the field of digital publishing in museums, [Walker Reader] is one of the projects that I point to every single time. I deeply admire the editorial work behind it, and am so, so perplexed to hear that something that leads in the field is being disbanded and its editor restructured out of a job. The press release points towards opening up the museum to a greater diversity of voices, and I think that must always be a constant goal of everything that is done in our institutions. There’s always room to push for more improvement—but to this outside eye, the Reader was already leading on this front.

Alex Greenberger, “Walker Art Center Staff Reorganization Results in End of Museum’s Closely Followed Digital Magazine,” ARTnews, Sept. 2, 2020:

Part of the museum’s elimination of several positions includes the loss of the Walker Reader, a digital magazine that published critical texts by artists, curators, and writers about current politics and their impact on art and institutions. For many in the art world, the Walker Reader, which had generated a loyal and international readership, had come to be considered an important publication within a gradually shrinking digital landscape for art journalism… The Walker Reader has been considered an essential publication within the art world. Artists such as Jack Whitten, Naeem Mohaiemen, Hans Haacke, Sky Hopinka, Natascha Sadr Haghihaghian, and others had contributed to it, as had critics and journalists such as Jessica Lynne, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Seph Rodney, Tyler Green, and many more.

Tyler Green, art historian, author, and critic, Twitter, Sept. 2, 2020:

.@walkerartcenter's short-sighted, self-lessening elimination of @iteeth's position - he'd been the only reason for non-MNers to so much as think of the Walker in recent years - spotlights the enormous brain drain underway in art museums and related non-profits - and its effects.

Jenna Ross, Staff shakeup at Walker Art Center aims to raise its ‘public voice,’” Star Tribune, Sept. 1, 2020:

Among the losses: Paul Schmelzer, editor of Walker Reader, who has worked for the Walker for 18 years. In 2014, he launched Artist Op-Eds, where artists grapple with urgent issues. Earlier this year, the New York Times mentioned the Walker Reader in praising the Walker's website as "a networked treasure house."

On a more personal note, these comments on my Facebook post made my day/year.

And, from Zachary Small’s Sept. 15, 2020, Artnet piece on brain drain in the arts:

 “What Mary Ceruti is doing there is disrespectful to the institution,” the art critic Tyler Green, who has been following the situation at the museum, said. “Why would anyone in the industry think they have job security when something like this happens to someone as prominent as Paul?”