New Archives

Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud

In this opening essay, I ask: what is the forms of arts scholarship, arts journalism, and arts criticism? What do they mean to the Seattle region’s arts sector? How do they overlap? How will they evolve? How we might -- Seattle’s arts community -- best support how the arts are discussed, archived, and writing about?

Also note -- I couldn’t finish by my deadline! So this opening essay isn’t yet complete and includes notes as I work towards completion

Almost two years ago -- in July 2019 -- I sat in a small conference room at Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture (OAC) in King Street Station. A few months prior in March 2019, OAC had relocated to this new third floor space, the station’s top floor above where trains leave to go to Portland, OR, and elsewhere across the U.S, and even Vancouver, BC. Flooded with light, and animated by brick walls and open ceiling, the new Office included not only desk space for OAC staff, but also the ARTS at the King Street Station Gallery. With movable falls, the 7,500 square foot gallery launched with the mission to increase opportunities for the region’s artists of color. The inaugurating exhibition, yəhaw̓, brazenly did this work, with 200 Indigenous artists presenting painting, photography, sculpture, video, and other forms within the gallery space.. The title, “drawn from the Coast Salish story of Native people from all tribes uniting around a common cause and lifting up the sky together,” echoed the gallery’s top-floor location, and crucially centered the presence and future of Indigenous people and art in Seattle.

Back to the small conference room: I had been invited to a conversation with Leah Baltus, former editor-in-chief of City Arts, the groundbreaking monthly publication centering arts in Seattle that unfortunately folded in 2018. Now in 2019, she was leading listening sessions at OAC -- to learn how best to support arts and culture media in Seattle, including arts journalism. We were the “educators” group, tasked with discussing the current field, and how the education system -- from elementary to graduate school, to beyond -- might more robustly support arts journalism and criticism. I talked about teaching in the Arts Leadership programs at Seattle University, where many of my courses include “art critiques” (more on those later), so that students not only sharpen how to write about various genres of art, but also learn more about arts journalism and criticism historiographies to understand the importance of arts media in the arts sector. There, I met Mariko Nagashima, Teen Programs Director at TeenTix. In addition to leading education programs, Nagashima manages youth arts journalists who write for the TeenTix Press Corps, which as written on the website allows “teens to explore and practice arts criticism and journalism.” In some ways Baltus and Nagashima represent overlapping past, presents, and futures of arts journalism in this region.

QUESTIONS FOR MYSELF: How might the privilege in the position I hold strengthen the state of arts writing in this region? How much art and performance history has been lost by the decline of arts journalism in the Seattle region?

State of the field

In the first two decades of the 21st century, Seattle was marked by the death of many “mainstream” arts media sources, including the reduction of full-time salaried arts journalists. Here’s a chronology. In 2009 -- amidst the Great Recession -- the daily Seattle Post-Intelligencer (owned by Hearst media) ceased to be a print publication and became a gutted online version of itself, making Seattle an “one newspaper-only town.” In 2016, Misha Berson, the longtime theater critic for The Seattle Times retired. In 2017, The Stranger’s Jen Graves award-winner, Pulitzer Prize finalists art critic since 2006, resigned. An ArtNews article about Graves’s resignation included: “When she moved to town 11 years ago, she said, every other major publication had a staff art critic. Following her resignation, none will.” In 2018, City Arts folded. And in 2019, the Seattle Weekly -- Seattle’s other prominent weekly publication founded in 1976 next to The Stranger -- ceased print publication. NEOLIBERAL OWNERSHIP -- IRONY THAT THEY FOLDED

In their stead -- often with less reach, but more pointed mission -- less capitalist publications emerged. The nonprofit news source Crosscut (founded in 2007 by the Weekly’s founder David Breswter) launched in 2007, became a nonprofit in 2009, and currently features two arts writers Brangien Davis, who writes a weekly column, and Margo Vansynghel -- WHAT HAS SHE COVERED. And yet Crocsscut does not include any reviews of arts exhibition, theatre production, or performing arts events. Founded in 2009 by writer Rosie Gaynor, the online publication Seattle Dances, mostly features reviews of dance events (INCLUDING), as well as editorial essays, previews, and interviews with dancers, choreographers, and other movement artists. Arts Journal, Alley News, other publications

In the 2010s, BIPOC-led publications and writers emerged in the city. LONGER HISTORY OF BIPOC NEWSPAPERS. Naomi Ishisaka (Colors NW, International Examiner).

In 2014, former Seattle Times reporter Marcus Harrison Green founded the online daily South Seattle Emerald as a black owned newspaper whose mission is to “amplify the authentic narratives of South Seattle.” EXAMPLE OF WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT. Starting in September 2020, I write a regular column called “Black and Center” that features BIPOC artists in the region, such as Hanako O’Leary, whose exhibition at METHOD is covered in this edition of New Archives, as well as artists including Monyee Chau, Tariqa Waters, and Matika Wilbur. Jasmyne Keiming, The Stranger NATIONALLY -- CRITICAL MINDED; conversations about arts reviewers of color.

TRAINING NEW GENERATION OF WRITERS. TEENTIX PRESS COPRS. In 2012, Sarah Stuteville, Jessica Partnow, and Alex Stonehill started the online daily Seattle Globalist (which ceased publication in 2020); the nonprofit news organization south to “highlight diverse voices and train the next generation of media makers,” and included an apprenticeship program for youth journalists. In 2016, Kemi Adeyemi, a University of Washington professor, launched the Black Embodiments Studio, an “Arts Writing Incubator + Public Lecture Series.” For the last four years, Adeyemi has led UW (and other area) graduate students to engage and write about Black art across Seattle, and then features their writing an annual journal, A Year in Black Art. GIVE EXAMPLES OF STORIES.

Types of arts writing

In a 2015 e-flux conversation, Karen Archey, now the Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, wrote a post distinguishing the first two categories:

I would argue that a necessary component of criticism is the analysis of an artwork, whereas journalism necessitates factual reportage on the events of the art world and its denizens. While an art journalist could report on say, the opening of the new Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum, an art critic would review the work in its opening show, to include the clarity and worth of the exhibition’s curatorial premise. (Shouldn’t there be a third word for writers who report on what so-and-so wore to the opening? Or writing weird conversational texts about art criticism?) These distinctions have perhaps less to do with an online/print divide than they do with one between journalism and criticism–and, weirdly, with prestige.

I do like the cleanness of her argument -- journalism as reporting and criticism as critical review, as it delineates specific functions of types of writing. I think about these categories through types of publications. Journalism often reporting stories published in regular daily, weekly, or monthly newspapers (many mentioned above), criticism -- as Archey writes -- offers an analysis of the work’s form and context -- and at least, sparks conversation about works, and is often published in “prestigious” outlets like Art Forum and Hyperallergic. And I think about my own experience as an arts journalist for the Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts, from 2007 to 2011,where I reported stories about concerts, and wrote an arts calendar, previewing upcoming events, exhibitions, and opening in the North Brooklyn neighborhoods. More recently, I have written art critiques for publications including ASAP/J Online, where I reviewed, in Archey’s words the “curatorial premise“ as well as the affect, aesthetics, and context of the 2019 Portland Biennial.

A third outlet -- scholarship -- is often published in peer-reviewed journals and books by academics with MFAs and PhDs who teach at universities. Detailed more below, art and performance historians have written monographs about artists, art movements, and arts theories that influence how arts fields are framed academically. In my fields of performance studies and theater, scholar also writes “performance reviews” of live theater and performing events for quarterly journals including TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Women & Performance, which in 2012 published my performance review of a NighTrain -- centered on their performance at Columbia City Theatre -- the Seattle, black feminist punk rock band. Adjacently, art historians often write exhibitions reviews for scholarly-led publications including caa.reviews, Art Journal Open, and ASAP/J Online. There is often a slowness and citational practice to scholarship -- peer-reviewed papers take more than a year to publish from original submission, and scholars are called upon to cite those in field upon whom their arguments and analysis build upon and diverge from -- that offers

As much as I like the distinctiveness of the three categories -- arts journalism (as reporting and storytelling from newspapers), criticism (as analysis of form, context and context published in arts journals), and scholarship (via slowness and citation in academic publication) -- I also like how Adeyemi uses the phrase “arts writing” It’s a thoughtful catchall that blurs the various genres, truer to the blurred work that many arts writers do. I think about writing about Seattle arts by Thea Quiray Tagle in Hyperallergic. Her background -- as a curator, PhD, and UMass Boston professor of ethnic studies and gender & sexuality studies -- offers curatorial and arts sector understanding, aesthetic critique, and citational diligence. For example, in Tagle’s review of yehaw, she thoughtfully counters and questions how the (largely) academic context of decolonialism does not frame the political work of the exhibition. She writes:

But you won’t hear its curators call yəhaw̓ a decolonial exhibition. So what is it, if not that? Let’s try taking the curators’ basic premise -- that this is a show curated by and for Indigenous artists and communities living and working in the Pacific Northwest -- as a simple fact, not as an exception. By doing so, it is far more interesting to consider yəhaw̓ as an example of Indigenous creatives having sovereignty over their visual representation and resources, or what artist-scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) would call “Indigenous resurgence and co-resistance.” … By creatively gaining and maintaining resources and access, being transparent about budgets and curatorial processes, and working towards creating temporary and permanent spaces to feature Indigenous makers, yəhaw̓’s curatorial team has created new systems that should inspire all art workers.

Similarly, in her review of the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s February 2020 opening, Tagle combines reporting, formal criticism, and reflection. “The museum,” she writes “now touts itself as the only dedicated Asian art museum in the United States with all its galleries organized by theme rather than geography,” before reviewing moment and exhibitions throughout the institution. Through a critical eye and understanding of U.S. museum historiography and race, she casts questions about how the museums silos more contemporary Asian Diasporic artists into educational programming, writing “Bustillo’s inclusion in the museum as educational supplement rather than part of the collection is deeply disappointing and prompts skepticism of the museum’s notion of “reimagining” Asian art. Contemporary art, Southeast Asian art, and acknowledgments of Indigeneity in Asia -- all of which are addressed in Bustillo’s multifaceted printmaking-performance-multimedia practice -- are nearly absent from Seattle’s Asian Art Museum, as they are in Asian art collections throughout the United States.”

Scholarship offers a third outlet for arts writing.

Writing that informs scholarship -- including theatre reviews.

Imagining new futures of arts writing

How might we imagine new futures of arts writing?

TEACHING

Yeehaw

Arts journalism newspaper

Why it is importnat

The type of arts scholarship, journalism and criticism that framed yhaw

So much about venue of publication:

Main essay for the newsletter

Arts scholarship in general

Arts criticism/scholarship

C. Carr

Critical Minded

Arts scholarship in our region

But also so much birth

Kemi Adeyemi

Seattle Dances

Marcus Green

Arts Journal

Naomi

Jasmyne Keiming

Margo

Brangien Davis, Crosscut

Arts scholarship more broadly

Jen Graves

Thea Quiray Tagle

Roleof scholarship; but also scholarship to minoritized artists and scholarsJose Munoz -- capturing work Joshua Chambers-Letson and C. Riley Snorton, Amber Musser, Kelly Chung, Ivan Ramos

Faye Gleisser

Kemi Adeyemi

Amber Musser

Jessica Lynne

Model for arts journals across the United States

Briefly reference essays

Word Count