The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation named eight arts writers as recipients of its prestigious annual prize in recognition of the contributions of visual arts journalists. Among the 2025 Rabkin Prize winners, announced today, September 4, are the founders of novel art publishing platforms, career staff writers at local and national publications, curators, and artists.
Curator Tempestt Hazel, co-founder of the Midwest arts publishing platform Sixty Inches From Center; critic Jessica Lynne, co-founder of the online art journal ARTS.BLACK; Fountainhead Arts Deputy Director Nicole Martinez; Oklahoma culture reporter Brandy McDonnell; America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), publishing editor of First American Art Magazine; nonfiction writer Eva Recinos; author and curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation); and New York Times Magazine Staff Writer J Wortham were recognized for intellectual and creative contributions to visual arts journalism.
Each winner will receive an unrestricted cash award of $50,000. This year’s winners mark the competition’s ninth cohort since its 2017 founding and $4 million in total prizes.
Four of this year’s winners — Recinos, Meredith, Martinez, and Lynne — have previously contributed to Hyperallergic, and Hazel served as a 2024 selection panelist for the Craft Archive Fellowship, organized by the Center for Craft and Hyperallergic.
Last year, Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard each received the Rabkin Foundation’s Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award for visual arts writing.
Candidates for the prize are nominated by individuals working in the visual arts, who are then considered by a jury. This year’s jurors included New Yorker Staff Writer Hua Hsu, art critic and author Joanne McNeil, and Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University Executive Director Jessica Bell Brown.
In an email to Hyperallergic, Mary Louise Schumacher, the executive director of the Rabkin Foundation, said that “the arts writing field has a lot of challenges, but a lack of talent is not one of them.”
“There is not a lack of brilliant, inventive, playful minds in our field, writers who work with so much devotion and care to bear witness to what artists do,” Schumacher said. “Every year, the list of Rabkin Prize winners gives me enormous hope not only about the profession but about the state of art itself.”
