Announcing the 2026 Rabkin Prize Winners

Announcing the 2026 Rabkin Prize Winners The Rabkin Foundation celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of today’s art writers, with eight unrestricted awards of $50,000 each. Marking a decade of support for arts writers, the Rabkin Foundation has named its 2026 recipients of the Rabkin Prize, awarding eight visual arts journalists $50,000 each in recognition of their creative and intellectual contributions to the field. The 2026 Rabkin Prize winners are: - 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. The Rabkin Foundation has distributed $4.1 million in Rabkin Prizes since 2017. An independent jury — comprised 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 — selected the winners from a pool of nominees. The Rabkin Prize is the central initiative of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. Leo Rabkin was an artist who worked and exhibited in New York. He and his wife, Dorothea, valued art discussion and created a landmark collection of what historically has been termed folk and outsider art. The foundation’s headquarters is home to a destination gallery, where all are welcome to explore Leo Rabkin’s work. Writers are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize. Learn more about the foundation and prize at rabkinfoundation.org.