Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is a veteran journalist who has been uniquely focused on the research and support of the field of visual arts journalism for many years. In 2024, she completed the first feature-length documentary film about art critics in the U.S., which was more than a decade in the making. That film, Out of the Picture, has screened at festivals around the world and received several jury prizes. It is prompting conversations about how to sustain and inspire the next generation of arts journalists and having real-world impacts. Mary Louise was the longtime art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she was intimately involved in exploring new models of journalism. For more than a decade, Mary Louise practiced a form of community-based journalism that was novel for legacy media, developing a community of contributors for a shared, multiplatform publishing project. She also developed programming and events for the paper, as a form of outreach to develop an audience. Mary Louise was also the Arts & Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2017, and the Clarice Smith Distinguished Critic at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019. While a Nieman Fellow, she conducted a national survey of arts writers across the country, which resulted in a series of articles for Nieman Reports about the priorities and challenges of the field. Mary Louise relocated to Maine in 2023 to take on a new role as executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, which supports visual arts journalism. At Rabkin, she hosts a podcast and newsletter that amplify exceptional arts journalism.