CMCA 2025 Distinguished Lecture: Jarrett Earnest and Mary Louise Schumacher present ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Art’

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is proud to announce its 2025 Distinguished Lecture, a conversation between critics Jarrett Earnest and Mary Louise Schumacher entitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Art.”

Produced with the generous support of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the talk will occur at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 18 at The Strand Theatre in Rockland.

Its title was inspired by Raymond Carver’s 1981 collection of short stories “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

CMCA’s 2025 Distinguished Lecture promises a scintillating discussion between two of the leading thinkers on art and art writing in our time.

Jarrett Earnest is the author of “What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics” and “Valid Until Sunset,” as well as the co-host of Angelic Transmissions, an art talk show on East Village Radio. He has edited and written the introductions to numerous volumes. Earnest has curated exhibitions at galleries and institutions including Nina Johnson, Miami; David Zwirner, New York; and the Drawing Center, New York. His teaching activities include serving as faculty liaison from 2014-2017 at the free experimental art school the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Earnest has been a fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Key West Literary Seminar, a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, and was the inaugural critic-in-residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency. In recognition of his deep engagement with the fields of art writing and art criticism, he was awarded the prestigious Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism in 2021. Earnest recently contributed an interview with Nicole Wittenberg to the artist’s first monograph, published on the occasion of three recent exhibitions including Cheek to Cheek at CMCA.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the executive director of The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. She was the longtime art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she was intimately involved in exploring new models of journalism as the co-leader of the Innovations Task Force. For more than a decade, Schumacher practiced a form of community-based journalism that was novel for legacy media, developing a community of contributors and advisers and a multiplatform project called Art City. In 2024, Schumacher completed a documentary film about art critics called Out of the Picture, which has screened at festivals around the world and received several jury prizes. Schumacher was also the Arts and Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and the Clarice Smith Distinguished Critic at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 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. In addition to leading the Rabkin Foundation, she hosts the podcast The Rabkin Interviews and writes The Rabkin Reader newsletter, which amplifies great arts writing across the United States.

CMCA’s Distinguished Lecture Series brings some of the leading artists and cultural thinkers of today to CMCA.

Tickets are $25 and available exclusively via The Strand Theatre’s website (rocklandstrand.com). For additional information, contact CMCA Communications Manager Lizzie Lombardo at elombardo@cmcanow.org or 207-701-5055, ext. 108, or visit CMCA or The Strand Theatre’s websites.