Arts Criticism: Why It (Still) Matters

Please join us for this free in-person event

6:30 - 8:00 p.m., Thursday, October 9, 2025

Art critics are often at the center of society’s most relevant conversations. They challenge us with new ideas and experiences, uncover artworks worthy of our collective attention, and write about shifts in the culture at large. In essence, they perform that most crucial of tasks: help us think together in public. 

But what does it mean to bear witness to the work of artists in a time of increasing political and economic turmoil? Who has the power to shape our cultural conversations in today’s media landscape?

This event brings together distinguished arts journalists and thinkers to explore why arts criticism and writing matter more than ever and to identify where some of the most inventive and courageous voices are emerging today, despite the increasing precarity of the field.

Sponsored by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Harvard Art Museums, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the panel includes Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman (2021 Nieman Fellow), formerly of The Washington Post; arts journalist Siddhartha Mitter, who writes for The New York Times and other outlets; Jeneé Osterheldt (2017 Nieman Fellow), a culture columnist and deputy managing editor for culture, talent, and development at The Boston Globe; and rashid shabazz, a critic and executive director of Critical Minded, an initiative focused on raising the visibility of critics of color. 

The discussion will be moderated by Mary Louise Schumacher (2017 Nieman Fellow), executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, which celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of arts journalists via the Rabkin Prize.

Sarah L. Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and a writing teacher. For three decades she reported on the arts for The Washington Post. She also writes for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, and The Boston Globe. A former McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University, she teaches at Harvard Extension School and the National Critics Institute. Kaufman was a 2021 Nieman Fellow, a French-American Foundation Journalism Fellow, and a Penn State Foster-Foreman Distinguished Writer in 2024. Her book “Verb Your Enthusiasm” (Penguin Press) publishes inApril 2026; “The Art of Grace,” her first book, was a Washington Post Notable Book.

Siddhartha Mitter is a freelance writer and critic with an interest in contemporary art and civic practices at the local, national, and international scale, with particular interest in Africa and the American South. Based in New York, he has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times since 2018. Mitter previously wrote regularly for The Village Voice. His work has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and other publications within and beyond the art field. Earlier in his career he wrote about music for The Boston Globe and was the culture reporter for WNYC public radio.

Jeneé Osterheldt is deputy managing editor for culture, talent, and development at The Boston Globe, and a culture columnist who covers identity and social justice through the lens of culture and the arts. She centers Black lives and the lives of people of color, which can mean writing about Beyoncé and Black womanhood or unpacking the importance of public art and representation. She joined the Globe in 2018 and was a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where her studies focused on the intersection of art and justice. She is founder of A Beautiful Resistance, a multimedia platform celebrating Black joy and dreams. 

rashid shabazz is a philanthropic and cultural worker, communications strategist, and advocate. He serves as executive director of Critical Minded, a grant-making and learning initiative founded in 2017 to build the resources and visibility of critics of color in the U.S. through direct support to publications and individuals, research, and convening. A former freelance writer and critic, shabazz received his bachelor’s degree in English from George Mason University and holds two master’s degrees, one in African Studies from Yale University and another from Columbia Journalism School.

Moderator:

Mary Louise Schumacher is a journalist and the executive director of The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, known for the Rabkin Prize for arts journalists. She was the longtime art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Schumacher was the Arts & Culture Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the Class of 2017 and the Clarice Smith Distinguished Critic at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019. She directed the first documentary about art critics made in the U.S., “Out of the Picture,” which is currently screening.

This event is part of ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).