The Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation in Portland, Maine, named eight recipients of its 2025 prize for visual arts journalists. The Rabkin Prize comes with an unrestricted $50,000 purse, along with creative and intellectual recognition of each writer’s respective contributions.
This year’s grant winners are Tempestt Hazel, co-founder of the Chicago–based festival Sixty Inches from Center; Jessica Lynne, associate editor at Momus; Nicole Martinez, critic and deputy director of the artist residency program Fountainhead Arts; Brandy McDonnell, features writer for The Oklahoman; America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), writer and publishing editor of First American Art Magazine; Eva Recinos, an independent arts and culture journalist; Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation), an author, essayist, and curator; and J Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
Launched by the Rabkin Foundation in 2017, the annual prize is one of the largest grants of its kind for visual arts journalists.
Additionally, for the second year, the foundation commissioned portraits by photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki of the winners in the spaces where they write. An accompanying project, titled the Rabkin
Interviews, also features discussions between Rabkin Foundation’s executive director Mary Louise Schumacher and the writers about their work and ideas. The interviews are slated to publish on Wednesdays, beginning on September 10, on Substack, podcast platforms, and its website.
“I have always been an arts writer,” J Wortham, who collaborated with Kimberly Drew on an independent book project, titled “Black Futures”, outside of their New York Times Magazine job, said in a statement. “It’s taken some elbow grease to get the places where I work to see that and also let me showcase that … I knew that I needed to create an opportunity for myself.”
The grant recipients were selected by a jury panel, which included Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker, author of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Stay True: A Memoir,” and publisher of the zine Suspended in Time; Joanne McNeil, a writer, editor, and author of the novel “Wrong Way” (2023) and the volume “Lurking: How a Person Became a User” (2020); and Jessica Bell Brown, executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
