The Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation in Portland, Maine, has named the winners of its 2024 grants for visual arts journalists, who include Art in America senior editor Emily Watlington. The grants carry an unrestricted $50,000, and recognize the “creative and intellectual contributions” of arts writers, per a release from the foundation.
The other grant 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; Los Angeles-based writer and painter Thomas Lawson; Siddhartha Mitter, a freelance writer and regular Times contributor; Cassie Packard, reviews editor at frieze and author of 2023’s Art Rules; and TK Smith, a cultural historian and curator of the arts of Africa and the African diaspora at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.
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The Rabkin Foundation launched the annual prize in 2017, and it still carries one of the largest purses available to professionals who write for a general audience (rather than academic peers). This year, for the first time, the Rabkin Foundation has commissioned portraits of the grant winners in their preferred workspace taken by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. The project, called the Rabkin Interviews, also consists of an interview with Mary Louise Schumacher, the foundation’s executive director, to be published on Substack in the following weeks.
“I’m grateful …this is going to help me continue to do the work for some period of time,” Mitter told the Foundation, adding that his greatest concern as an arts writer is “survival” amid the present-day media landscape. “The broader problem is there’s no current path to sustaining a practice as an arts writer.”
Judging the grants this year were Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival; rashid shabazz, executive director of the grant-making project Critical Minded; and Alexandra Grant, a Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist.
“We wanted to humanize the labors of these essential writers,” Schumacher, a writer herself, said. “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.”