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# Announcing the 2026 Rabkin Prize Winners
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/announcing-the-2026-rabkin-prize-winners/
- Published: 2026-09-10T09:59:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T09:59:16.000Z
- Description: The Rabkin Foundation celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of today’s art writers, with eight unrestricted awards of $50,000 each.
- Author: Rabkin Foundation
- Tags: Announcement, Rabkin Prize, Sponsored, Awards

Marking a decade of support for arts writers, the [Rabkin Foundation](https://bit.ly/4xpeop9?ref=hyperallergic.com) 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](https://bit.ly/4xpeop9?ref=hyperallergic.com).