What Forms?

In this roundtable discussion from the Art Papers Art Writing and Publishing Symposium, Maori Karmael Holmes, Jameson Johnson, and Siddhartha Mitter discuss what forms of writing, publishing, and programming matter most. They were prompted by the questions: Are there forms that feel inadequate or unable to respond to current realities, or ones that feel emergent in their relevance? What about print vs digital, writing vs other media, “critique” vs “art writing,” and balancing fundability with identity? What are new ways to communicate, and new (or old/worth reviving) ways to respond to rapid change?

Maori Karmael Holmes (she/her) is a filmmaker, writer, and curator currently based in Philadelphia. She founded BlackStar Film Festival in 2012, and she serves as chief executive & artistic officer of its parent organization, BlackStar Projects. She has organized film programs at Anthology Film Archives, MOCA, and Whitney Museum. She has organized the exhibitions Rashid Zakat: Uses of the Ironic (2024), Terence Nance: Swarm (2023), Assemblage (2019), and Lossless (2017). As a director, her works have screened internationally, including Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop (2005). She has directed music videos for India.Arie, Mike Africa Jr., and Wayna. She has produced several films, including Iyabo Kwayana’s By Water (2023). Her writing has most recently appeared in Seen, Documentary Magazine, The Believer, Film Quarterly, and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. She hosted the culture podcast Many Lumens from 2020 to 2023. Holmes was announced as recipient of the 2023 United States Artists Berresford Prize. In 2022, she was announced as an inaugural Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures Fellow, named one of the Kennedy Center’s #Next50, and was included among Philadelphia magazine’s 100 Most Influential Philadelphians (as well as being designated “Best Film Ambassador”). In 2019, she was included on ESSENCE magazine’s Woke 100 List.

Jameson Johnson (she/her) is a writer, curator, and community organizer based in Boston. She is the founder and executive director at Boston Art Review, an online and print publication founded in 2017 that is committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art throughout New England. She has held positions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and currently serves on the board of Catalyst Conversations and the Foundry Arts Consortium’s Advisory Committee, as well as the MassArt Auction Committee. She has curated exhibitions at Boston Center for the Arts, Fountain Street Gallery, and Boston Cyberarts, and she has served on numerous juries in New England. Her writing has also appeared in Artsy, Artnet, Upstate Diary, and the Boston Globe, among other publications.

Siddhartha Mitter (he/him) is a writer on contemporary art and its social and civic dimensions. He writes in-depth profiles of artists, reported features, and reviews. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, covering artists and exhibitions across the United States, as well as in Africa and Europe. He has written for Artforum, Art in America, and many other publications within and beyond the art field. Trained in the social sciences, Mitter has worked in culture journalism for two decades. He received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2017, delivered the AICA-USA Distinguished Critic lecture in 2022, and won a Rabkin Prize for art writing in 2024. He is based in New York City.