Art Forum: Rabkin Foundation Awards $400,00 to Arts Writers

July 22, 2019 at 3:51pm

RABKIN FOUNDATION AWARDS $400,000 TO ARTS JOURNALISTS

The Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation in Portland, Maine, has awarded $400,000 to eight writers for the third cycle of its annual grant program, which honors contributions to arts journalism. The recipients, whose work has been published regularly in Artforum, Artnews, Art in America, New York Magazine, Aperture, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and ARTS.BLACK, among other media outlets, will each get $50,000.

“We award these prizes each summer with great joy and anticipation,” Susan C. Larsen, executive director of the foundation said in a statement. “Today would have been Leo Rabkin’s one-hundredth birthday. His embrace of writing and scholarship in the arts serves as a guide to our philanthropic program. Dorothea’s special feeling for young people is reflected in this new generation of writers who are changing the discourse across our nation. We hope these awards will help them achieve a long career in this most valuable profession.”

This year’s participating jurors were Dennis Scholl, president and CEO of Oolite Arts; Rainey Knudson, cofounder of Glasstire magazine; and David Frankel, contributing editor of Artforum.

The 2019 awardees are as follows:

Taylor Renee Aldridge, cofounder of ARTS.BLACK (Detroit, Michigan)

Mariela Fullana Acosta, journalist and contributor to Primera Hora and El Nuevo Día (San Juan, Puerto Rico)

Sarah Hotchkiss, visual arts editor at KQED, an affiliate of San Francisco Bay Area NPR and PBS (San Francisco, California)

Cara Ober, founding editor of BmoreArt, a daily online art magazine and biannual print journal (Baltimore, Maryland)

Kristina Kay Robinson, artist, curator, writer, and current editor of Room 220 (New Orleans, Louisiana)

Andrew Russeth, executive editor of Artnews (New York, New York)

Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books, 2020) (Santa Fe, New Mexico)

Catherine Wagley, contributing editor of Momus and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California)