The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has announced its 2026 Rabkin Prize recipients, awarding eight visual arts journalists $50,000 each in unrestricted funds to celebrate a decade of support for cultural criticism and reporting.
Marking a Decade of Arts Writing Support in Portland
Based in Portland, Maine, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation marked its ten-year milestone by naming the eight visual arts journalists chosen for this year’s honors. Leo Rabkin was an artist who worked and exhibited in New York, and he and his wife, Dorothea, valued art discussion and created a landmark collection of what historically has been termed folk and outsider art. Since launching the awards in 2017, the foundation has distributed $4.1 million in Rabkin Prizes to support the creative and intellectual contributions of critics, essayists, and data journalists across the field.
An independent jury selected the winners from a pool of nominees. This year’s panel consisted of Irene Borger, a writer, teacher, and founding director of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; Jaime DeSimone, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; and Legacy Russell, a curator, writer, and executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen, an artist-driven collective in New York City.
The 2026 Rabkin Prize Recipients
The Rabkin Foundation celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of today’s art writers, with eight unrestricted awards of $50,000 each. The 2026 Rabkin Prize winners include an array of critics, cultural strategists, authors, and data journalists:
- Damien Davis – an artist, educator, and writer whose work explores how power, race, and cultural narratives are constructed and circulated.
- Melaine Ferdinand-King – a cultural strategist, poet, and writer focused on historical and community narratives, and the inaugural curator of the African American Museum of Rhode Island.
- Tyler Green – a critic, author, and longtime host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast.
- Alicia Inez Guzmán – a critic and award-winning investigative journalist focused on culture and land use.
- Julia Halperin – a critic, editor, investigative data journalist, and co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, which tracks equity and representation in the art world.
- Sarah Lewis – an award-winning author, associate professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and founder of Vision & Justice, an initiative that reveals the role of culture in representational democracy.
- Jan Tumlir – an author, editor, educator, and founding editor of the Los Angeles-based contemporary art journal X-TRA.
- Kaelen Wilson-Goldie – a journalist and critic with decades of international reporting experience who writes often about the relationship between art and politics.
This year’s prize winners are brilliant, world-building minds who are deeply interested in the forces that shape what we see—and what we don’t. Across a range of practices, they consider how art operates in the world, tracing its relationship to history, land, race, institutions, war, memory, and public life. At a moment when cultural narratives are intensely contested, these writers insist on close attention, deep research, complexity, independent thought, and a long view.
History is the ground that we walk on,
Ferdinand-King says during her interview for this year’s Rabkin Interviews podcast. It sets the conditions that art responds to. And art is where history and even identity and lived experience become legible, known to wider audiences.
Guzmán similarly describes the broader forces she encounters through her cultural journalism: “When I’m writing about art, I’m very likely writing about histories of land use that are deeply tied to histories of colonialism … structures of power, state-sanctioned violence. How do all of those things come through in visualizations of landscape or of land across media?… What can this reveal to me that’s still a blind spot for me or for other people?”
