The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has announced the winners of its 2024 Prize for arts journalists.
The Rabkin Prize was established in 2017 as an annual award program providing grants of $50,000 to journalists writing about the visual arts for a general audience. The prize is the main initiative of the foundation, founded by artist Leo Rabkin and his wife, Dorothea, who was a proponent of discussion around the visual arts. Glasstire’s former Editor-in-Chief Christina Rees was an inaugural recipient of the prize. Since then other Texas authors, including Neil Fauerso, Darryl R. Ratcliff, II, and Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin have been awarded the prize.
Each year, writers are nominated by a 16-person panel made up of people working in the visual arts across the U.S. Then, a separate three-person 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.
rashid shabazz, Alexandra Grant, and Dennis Lim
This year’s awardees 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 at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta; and Emily Watlington, a writer and senior editor at Art in America.
Cassie Packard, Emily Watlington, Greg Allen, Holland Cotter, Robin Givhan, Siddhartha Mitter, Thomas Lawson, TK Smith. Photos by Kevin J. Miyazaki
In a press release, the foundation stated, “We believe arts writers 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.”
Learn more about this year’s awardees and listen to interviews that will be published on The Rabkin Foundation’s substack page.
