Rabkin Foundation Names Eight Winners of Its 2026 Arts Journalism Grants 

The Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation in Portland, Maine, named eight recipients of its 2026 prize for visual arts journalists. The Rabkin Prize carries an unrestricted $50,000 purse, along with creative and intellectual recognition. This year’s recipients, the foundation said, are “deeply interested in the forces that shape what we see—and what we don’t.”

This year’s grant winners are Damien Davis, a writer, educator, and artist whose work interrogates how cultural narratives are made and changed through shared visuals; Melaine Ferdinand-King, the inaugural curator of the African American Museum of Rhode Island and a writer focused on the role of art in community building; Tyler Green, a critic and host of the long-running The Modern Art Notes Podcast; Alicia Inez Guzmán, a critic and investigative journalist focused on colonialism, identity, and land, with a recent focus on the legacy of nuclear testing on Indigenous communities.

Also among the winners are Julia Halperin, a critic and investigative data journalist and co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report, which tracks equity and representation in the art world; Sarah Lewis, a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and founder of Vision & Justice, a civic initiative that examines the use of culture in representational democracy, and author of the award-winning book The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America; Jan Tumlir, an author, educator, and founding editor of the Los Angeles-based contemporary art journal X-TRA; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, a journalist and critic with a record of uncovering the relationship between art and politics around the world.

The foundation wrote of this year’s cohort: “Across a range of practices, they consider how art operates in the world, tracing its relationship to history, land, race, institutions, war, memory, and public life. At a moment when cultural narratives are intensely contested, these writers insist on close attention, deep research, complexity, independent thought, and a long view.”

Launched by the Rabkin Foundation in 2017, the annual prize is one of the largest grants of its kind for visual arts journalists and has distributed $4.1 million in awards since its inception. This year’s judges were Irene Borger, a writer, educator, 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 in New York City.

The foundation has again commissioned portraits by photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki of the winners in the spaces where they write. An accompanying podcast, titled the Rabkin
Interviews, in which the winners discuss their writing process and perspective on art writing, is forthcoming.

“History is the ground that we walk on,” Ferdinand-King says during her interview for the Rabkin Interviews podcast. “It sets the conditions that art responds to. And art is where history and even identity and lived experience become legible, known to wider audiences.”