What Audiences?
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In this roundtable discussion from the Art Papers Art Writing and Publishing Symposium, Daria Simone Harper, Courtney McClellan, and Emily Watlington consider what readers want and need from arts writing today—and ask: Is there any common ground? They were prompted with the following questions: How can we balance intellectual rigor vs popular accessibility, or is this possible? Who is the audience for art writing/art criticism? How do we reach and engage with them? How have that audiences’ expectations changed in recent years?
Daria Simone Harper (she/her) is a storyteller, editor, and cultural producer whose writing practice is grounded in an effort to unearth the nuanced ways that visual art can shape one’s relationship to memory, spirituality, and healing on personal and universal scales, especially in relation to the experiences of Black women and femmes. She is the co-founder of Jupiter Magazine (January 2024), an art and culture publication committed to creating editorial conditions that support more viable writing lives. She is also the founder and host of The Art of It All, a podcast and platform for dialogue and discovery around Black and brown artists and makers. Her work has been featured in publications including Artnet, ARTnews, Burnaway, Cultured Magazine, ESSENCE, Hyperallergic, i-D, and W, among others. She has spoken on panels about arts writing, criticism, and independent publishing at the Guggenheim Museum, The Poetry Foundation, Art Basel Miami Beach, and NADA New York.
Courtney McClellan (she/her) is an artist, writer, editor, and educator living in Atlanta. Her work has been shown at museums and exhibition spaces such as SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY (2018) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta (2021). McClellan has been awarded fellowships at the Library of Congress and the University of Michigan. Her practice has been supported by residences at McDowell, Yaddo, Wassaic Projects, and Stove Works. Her work has been written about in Art in America, ART PAPERS, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. McClellan is the editor and artistic director at Burnaway, a nonprofit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South and the Caribbean. Recently, her essay “Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes” was published in Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art (Routledge 2023), a volume edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace.
Emily Watlington (she/her) is a critic, curator, and senior editor at Art in America. Her writing often focuses on disability culture, feminism, and those places where art and science meet. She is a Fulbright scholar with a master’s degree from MIT in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art. In 2020, she received the Theorist Award from C/O Berlin, and in 2018, the Vera List Writing Prize for Visual Art. When she is able to step away from New York, where her life revolves around reading, writing, and seeing art, she is curious about surfing, foraging mushrooms, deserts, and animal liberation.