The Rabkin Prize recognizes the work of writers who are at the heart of our most essential conversations, help us think together in public, create the original field research for art history, and bear witness to the value of what artists do.
The 2024 Rabkin Prize winners are Greg Allen, of greg.org; Holland Cotter, chief art critic for the New York Times; Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large for the Washington Post; Thomas Lawson, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer; Siddhartha Mitter, a freelance writer and critic; Cassie Packard, a writer, reviews editor at frieze, and author of Art Rules (Frances Lincoln, 2023); TK Smith, a cultural historian and curator of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta; and Emily Watlington, a writer and editor at Art in America.
In an effort to humanize these writers and their work, the Rabkin Foundation did something different this year. For the first time, it commissioned portraits of the prize winners in the spaces where they work and conducted interviews about their lives and ideas. The project, called the Rabkin Interviews, will launch in September and will be found on Substack, social media, the foundation’s new website, and most podcasting platforms.
This is the eighth cycle of the Rabkin Prize, which has now awarded $3.5 million since it was inaugurated in 2017. The award program is done by nomination. Nominators working in the visual arts across the country provided the list of potential winners, and candidates for the prize submitted recent work samples and a resume. An independent jury selects the winners. This year’s jury included Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival; rashid shabazz, executive director of Critical Minded; and Alexandra Grant, a Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist. Writers can be renominated and are eligible until they win the prize.
The Rabkin Prize is the central initiative of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. Leo Rabkin was an artist who worked and exhibited in New York. He and his wife, Dorothea, valued art discussion and had a wide circle of friends. They also created a landmark collection of what has historically been termed folk and outsider art. The foundation’s headquarters is home to a destination gallery, where all are welcome to explore Leo Rabkin’s work.
To learn more about the foundation and prize, visit rabkinfoundation.org.
