Hyperallergic Writers Among 2026 Rabkin Prize Recipients
Contributors Damien Davis and Alicia Inez Guzmán are among the eight arts writers who received the award.
Hyperallergic contributor Damien Davis is among the eight arts writers who received the 2026 Rabkin Prize, an annual, nomination-based award granted by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. The recipients, announced today, September 10, hail from diverse sectors of arts writing, from investigative arts journalism to cultural research around race, power, and democracy.
In addition to Davis, who works as a Newark-based artist and educator, the 2026 Rabkin winners are Alicia Inez Guzmán, an investigative writer whose work has appeared in Hyperallergic; Melaine Ferdinand-King, a Rhode Island-based poet and cultural strategist; Tyler Green, host of the Modern Art Notes podcast; Julia Halperin, editor-at-large of Cultured magazine; Sarah Lewis, art critic and an African and African American Studies professor at Harvard University; Jan Tumlir, a founding editor of the Los Angeles-based art journal X-TRA; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, an international arts and culture critic. Grantees will be awarded an unrestricted sum of $50,000 each.
"At a moment when so much of our culture encourages speed, certainty and simplification, these are writers who insist on close attention, deep research, complexity, independent thought and a long view," Mary Louise Schumacher, the executive director of the Rabkin Foundation, told Hyperallergic over email.
"Spending time with their work — and with them — has reminded me what a gift that is,” Schumacher added.
An independent jury of arts professionals selects the awardees, all of whom offer unique insight into the complex dynamics undergirding the art world. Davis, whose opinion pieces traverse his own experience losing an archive of artworks to a hasty auction, the issues with the standard 50/50 monetary split between artists and galleries, and the crushing debt traps obscured by art schools, refuses to subscribe to the romantic mythos around his career path. Guzmán uses investigative rigor to illustrate how museums can literally flatten pre-existing community artworks, destroying beacons of history while trying to find a home for others.
“It’s exciting and affirming to know that, as a visual artist, I can also carve out space for myself as a writer, champion other artists, and make the parts of the art world that can feel nebulous or intimidating a little more legible, so that we can all move through it in a more informed way,” Davis told Hyperallergic. “Receiving this recognition allows me to keep moving forward as an artist who doesn’t see boundaries between writing, visual art, and advocacy.”
Each recipient will delve deeper into their work on the Rabkin Interviews podcast, set to publish each Wednesday on various platforms, starting on September 16.
Founded in 1999 by New York City-based couple Leo and Dorothea Rabkin, the foundation advances visual arts careers with support from the Rabkin estate. Since the prizes were established in 2017, the foundation has disbursed over $4 million in award money, with previous recipients including author Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation) and cultural historian TK Smith.
In 2024, Hyperallergic co-founder and Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian won the Rabkin Lifetime Achievement Award for his "generational impact on the field."
"They don’t treat art as something sealed off from life; they understand it as a way into history, land, race, politics, war, memory, institutions and public life," Schumacher said about this year's recipients. "They are wonderfully different as writers — in their voices and in their ideas about what arts writing can be — but they are rare, world-building minds, thinking alongside others in public about matters of real consequence."
