PORTLAND, MAINE – First American Art Magazine publishing editor, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), is among eight visual arts journalists who have been awarded the Rabkin Prize. This annual prize celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of today’s arts writers and comes with a $50,000 unrestricted award. Meredith will invest these funds into FAAM.
The other seven 2025 Rabkin Prize winners are Tempestt Hazel, co-founder of Sixty Inches from Center; Jessica Lynne, writer, critic and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK; Nicole Martinez, critic and deputy director of Fountainhead Arts; Brandy McDonnell, features writer for The Oklahoman; Eva Recinos, an arts and culture journalist; Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche/Choctaw), author, essayist, and curator; and J Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
“This is a completely unexpected honor,” says Meredith. “I focus on writing as clearly as possible to reach Native American audiences who may not have art education and art audiences who may be unfamiliar with Indigenous issues. My goal in writing is to connect all the diverse audiences for Native art with each other.
For a second year, the Rabkin Foundation has commissioned portraits of the prize winners in the spaces where they write and interviewed them about their work and ideas. The project, called the Rabkin Interviews, features conversations conducted by Mary Louise Schumacher, a journalist and the Rabkin Foundation’s executive director, and portraits by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki.
Meredith joins Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke), FAAM’s contributing editor, as the second FAAM core team member to win the Rabkin Award. Pratt of Tulsa, Oklahoma, won the award in 2022.
In the interviews, many of this year’s winners speak candidly about how they had to create their own space and platforms – and a sense of permission – to pursue their arts writing.
“I wouldn’t be writing … because I felt really rejected in a lot of ways for the way that I approached writing, the way I thought about art,” says Tempestt Hazel, speaking of co-founding Sixty Inches from Center, a publishing platform and archival project, where she felt liberated to write more expansively.
“I have always been an arts writer,” says J Wortham, who did a lot of freelance arts writing outside of their New York Times Magazine job and collaborated with Kimberly Drew on an independent project, the book Black Futures. “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 Rabkin Interviews podcast will publish on Wednesdays, starting September 10, on Substack, podcasting platforms, and our website.
This is the ninth cycle of the Rabkin Prize, which has now awarded nearly $4 million since it was inaugurated in 2017. Nominators working in the visual arts across the country served as nominators, providing the list of potential winners, and candidates for the prize submitted recent work samples and a resume. An independent jury then selected the winners. Writers can be renominated and are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize.
Jurors
This year’s jury included Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker, author of Stay True: A Memoir, which was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, and publisher of Suspended in Time, a zine about music and life; Joanne McNeil, a writer, editor and author of “Wrong Way,” a novel, and “Lurking: How a Person Became a User,” a book examining online platforms; and Jessica Bell Brown, executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a curator, writer, and art historian.
About the Rabkin Foundation
The Rabkin Prize is the central funding 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 for decades in New York. He and his wife, Dorothea, valued art discussion and had a wide circle of friends, including artists, writers, journalists, and curators. They created a landmark collection of what has historically been termed folk and outsider art. The foundation’s headquarters serve as a destination gallery and study center focused on Rabkin’s work.
Trustees of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation are: Edgar Allen Beem, a journalist in Brunswick, Maine; Deborah Irmas, a philanthropist, curator, and writer in Los Angeles; Nancy Karlins Thoman, Ph.D., an art historian and writer in Santa Fe, N.M.; AX Mina, an arts writer, media expert, nonprofit consultant, and filmmaker in Brooklyn; and rashid shabazz, executive director of Critical Minded, in Baltimore.
Links
- Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, link
- Rabkins Interviews, Substack
- America Meredith, art portfolio
- Stacy Prat, PhD (Mvskoke), link