The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 Rabkin Prize. The annual award honours eight art writers in the US, each of whom receives a $50,000 cash prize. This year’s cohort includes academics, podcasters and The Art Newspaper contributor and former editor Julia Halperin (co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report).
The other winners are the New Jersey-based artist and writer Damien Davis, Melaine Ferdinand-King (inaugural curator of the African American Museum of Rhode Island), Tyler Green of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, the Southwest-based writer Alicia Inez Guzmán, the Harvard University professor Sarah Lewis (founder of the Vision & Justice initiative and curator of a new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago), the Los Angeles-based Jan Tumlir (founding editor of the contemporary art journal X-TRA) and the independent journalist and critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
Many of this year’s awardees tackle issues of politics, power, race, equity and representation—in the art world and beyond. A series of interviews with these writers will be available online on 16 September.
“It was always going to take more than the work of laws to transform society,” Lewis says on an upcoming episode of the Rabkin Interviews podcast. “It was going to require the work of culture to push us past our blind spots.”
Based in Portland, Maine, the Rabkin Foundation has awarded a total of more than $4m in Rabkin Prizes since 2017. Candidates are chosen through a nomination process, and an independent jury picks the winners based on their recent work samples and resumes. This year’s jury comprised Irene Borger (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 (director and chief curator of The Kitchen in New York).