Notes on the 2022 Pulitzer Prize: Critique

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The two Michels:

It is such an honor to see the Culture department rewarded again this year.

I want to thank Dean, Joe, AG and the Sulzberger family for continuing to invest in our arts coverage.

Thanks to your commitment, we were able to call on Salamishah Tillet as a critic at large.

And thank you, Sam and Gilbert. You care so deeply about criticism, at a time when its practice is more important than ever.

Salamishah started the year with one mission: to explore the ways in which the racial justice movement was influencing the arts.

Black stories were being told in complex new ways, and she traced Bridgerton’s racial politics to Broadway.

Then, a year after the death of George Floyd, she wrote a searing essay about her role as a black critic, what it means to bear witness and find hope in art.

The Rodney King video made her want to be a high school critic, she wrote.

And now, on the 30th anniversary of that traumatic time, she has won the Pulitzer Prize.

Gilbert is a champion of current affairs essays. And Salamishah likes to write them.

When something important happens, she immediately texts to ask: Do you need anything? Because I have some ideas.

Text after text of ideas. So many ideas.

And they are brilliant, surprising and steeped in history.

But I’m not the only one to have the joy of working with her. I would also like to thank Stephanie Goodman, Nicole Herrington, Jeremy Egner and Barbara Graustark.

We love how she writes with authority through the arts. But that’s not all: she is also a professor at Rutgers.

She’s so dedicated that she wakes up at age 4 to catch up on pop culture before getting her kids ready for school. His passion is endless.

We were so proud of you, Salamishah. And I couldn’t dream of a more radiant, more generous, more brilliant friend.

Salamishah Tillet:

Thank you, Sia, for your generous introduction.

After Sia, I too would like to thank my colleagues at The New York Times, our outstanding Sulzberger family leadership team, Dean Baquet and Sam Sifton. And the dynamic writing led by the always curious and always united Gilbert Cruz and, of course, Sia Michel (who I will come back to a little later) from the Culture section.

But, before I do that, I’d like to reflect on the twin openings of 2021. If 2020, as our colleague Wesley Morris so brilliantly captured in his award-winning prose, was the year of presidential impeachment, a pandemic global, racial protest and a presidential election in 2021 were what lay in its wake. Marked in its first month by a political insurrection and a presidential inauguration, we have never been able to completely escape this paradox, echoing that of our founder, certainly in which the symbols, the rituals, the propaganda of despotism and the poetry of democracy are falling on us. In the hours and months that followed, I desperately tried to make sense of the chaos.

I have therefore observed, testified and written about the role of art, in particular the role of black artists as arbiters and animators of change. What did it mean for individuals, like members of the British monarchy, or institutions, like the Met, to recognize and perhaps heed their racist histories? How does culture, a photograph on black utopia, a film on racial transition or a play on lynching, teach us and help us to follow perhaps even more than laws, polls or tons of data on racial progress? What do they tell us about how far we have come as a people and how far we still have to go as a nation?

I had help exploring these questions and more with the best in the game. In their own way, cultural editors like Barbara Graustark, Jeremy Egner, Stephanie Goodman, Nicole Herrington, and art editor Jessie Wender helped make my ideas and readings clearer, crisper and even more compelling. I would also like to thank my second-round editors, Cielo Buenaventura, Emily Brennan, Deborah Leiderman, David Renard, Maya Salam, and Susanna Timmons. Their simple words of encouragement or their quick modification of the lines made all the difference.

I also had the good fortune to work with Sia Michel, one of the most thoughtful, insightful and intuitive people (in the sense that she can see a cultural zeitgeist unfolding before it has started) that I have. have ever met. As Senior Writer, she brings such care and awareness to all of my words that I can sincerely say this award is as much mine as hers. I would also like to publicly thank my attorney, Lisa Davis, and my literary agent, Tanya McKinnon. She, more than any other, patiently convinced me that I had the qualities as a critic to jump from the ivory tower to the Gray Lady.

I owe everything to my family: My mother, Volora Howell, was the first journalist I met and gave me my first library and the gift of art. My father, Lennox Tillet, not only took me to my first book fairs, but he also taught us to appreciate the protest function of art. To my late brother, Shaka, who never forgot to remind me that hip-hop was the prophetic voice of the people and for the people. And my sister, Scheherazade, whose photographs have literally saved my life and are the visual inspiration for the type of critic I aspire to be. To my children, Seneca and Sidney Steplight-Tillet, artists, dreamers and activists, who are my muses and my best teachers. Keep shining! And to my life partner, Solomon Steplight. He helps me free up space to write and imagine, and is my ideal reader and friend.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my training in the fields of African American and American Studies, my colleagues at Rutgers University Newark, and thank the circle of black feminist artists and critics Thadious Davis, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and away and at the Times, Margo Jefferson who all taught me to appreciate, study, critique and write about black women artists, not as a narrow field or a shallow place, but as the voice of multitudes, which is truly another way of saying like the voice of freedom.

Thanks.

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