RABKIN FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2024 ARTS JOURNALISM GRANTEES

The Dorothea and LeoRabkin Foundationhas named eight recipients of its 2024Rabkin Prizefor arts journalists. Each will receive an unrestricted award of $50,000. Inaugurated in 2017, the grants recognize the contributions of journalists writing about the visual arts for a general audience. The judging panel this year comprised Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival; rashid shabazz, executive director of Critical Minded, a grantmaking project; and Los Angeles- and Berlin-based artist Alexandra Grant.

This year’s cohort includes Greg Allen, who runs the website greg.org; Holland Cotter, chief art critic for theNew York Times; Robin Givhan, senior critic at large for theWashington Post; Thomas Lawson, a writer and artist living and working in Los Angeles; freelance writer Siddhartha Mitter, a regular contributor to theTimes; Frieze reviews editor Cassie Packard, author ofArt Rules(2023); cultural historian TK Smith, curator of the arts of Africa and the African diaspora at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta; and Emily Watlington, a writer and senior editor atArt in America.

“This is going to help me continue to do the work for some period of time,” Mitter said in a statement. “The broader problem,” he said, “is there’s no current path to sustaining a practice as an arts writer.”

This year, for the first time, the Rabkin Foundation has commissioned portraits of each of the grantees, who were photographed by Kevin J. Miyazaki in the work setting of their choice. Interviews with all eight winners, conducted by the foundation’s executive director, Mary Louise Schumacher, will be available on the organization’s social media platforms, website, podcast, and Substack.

“We wanted to humanize the labors of these essential writers,” said Schumacher in a statement. “We believe arts writers are in the center 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.”