Amid harsh cutbacks across the publishing field, art and culture critics have been hit especially hard. To meet the moment, the Maine-based Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has been giving out unrestricted $50,000 grants to arts writers since 2017, and has just announced its newest round of honorees.

The 2024 winners are Greg Allen, of greg.org; Holland Cotter, chief art critic for the New York Times; Robin Givhan, senior critic-at-large for the Washington Post; Thomas Lawson, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer; Siddhartha Mitter, a freelance writer and critic; Cassie Packard, a writer, editor at Frieze, and author of Art Rules (2023); TK Smith, a cultural historian and curator of the arts of Africa and the African diaspora at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; and Emily Watlington, a writer and senior editor at Art in America.

“This is going to help me continue to do the work for some period of time,” Mitter said in press materials, stressing that survival is his greatest challenge as an arts writer. “The broader problem,” he said, “is there’s no current path to sustaining a practice as an arts writer.”

Emily Watlington, winner of the 2024 Rabkin Prize, at her home office in Brooklyn, N.Y. Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki.

Want to learn more about the winners? You’re in luck. Interviews conducted by the foundation’s executive director, Mary Louise Schumacher (ex-Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critic and director of Out of the Picture, a 2023 documentary on art criticism), will appear on the foundation’s social media platforms, website, podcast, and Substack. 

“We wanted to humanize the labors of these essential writers,” said Schumacher in press materials. “We believe arts writers are in the center of our most essential conversations, help us think together in public, create the original field research for art history, and bear witness to the value of what artists do.”

Siddhartha Mitter, winner of the 2024 Rabkin Prize, talks with Mary Louise Schumacher, executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki.

This is the eighth cycle of the prize, which has distributed $3.5 million in grants. This year’s jury included Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival; rashid shabazz, executive director of Critical Minded; and Alexandra Grant, a Los Angeles and Berlin-based artist.

The foundation was created by artist Leo Rabkin and his wife Dorothea, who also built a collection of folk art that is on view at a gallery at the foundation’s headquarters.