The Center for Maine Contemporary Art will present its 2025 Distinguished Lecture, a conversation between critics Jarrett Earnest and Mary Louise Schumacher titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Art,” at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Aug. 18, at The Strand Theatre in Rockland. Produced with the generous support of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the talk title is inspired by Raymond Carver’s 1981 collection of short stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

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 including “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017” by Peter Schjeldahl; “The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955”; and “Feint of Heart: Art Writings 1982-2002” by Dave Hickey.

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.

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.