Between stints as an art writer/editor at the Walker Art Center, I was editor at the Minnesota Independent and also the site’s media critic. I spent four or five years documenting media consolidation, newsrooms contracting, and arts and culture writers falling to budget cuts at legacy dailies and altweeklies alike (culture writers were almost always the first let go). Shortly after returning to the Walker to launch its online publishing portal in 2011, I organized an international conference, Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, as a way to ponder art journalism’s “possible futures” in this climate.
The future was, and continues to be, pretty grim.
So when I was asked to be on the jury for the Rabkin Foundation’s annual prize for arts writers, of course I was thrilled. Help pick eight arts writers to each get $50,000… just for being great, smart, community-connected writers? I’m in.
Over the past six years, the foundation—named after artist Leo and his wife Dorothea Rabkin—has given $2,775,000 to arts writers all across the US. Astounding, really.
For the 2022 Rabkin Prize, I was part of a small but sharp jury—with Sasha Anawalt, founding director of the USC Getty Arts Journalism Program, and Wall Street Journal arts editor Eric Gibson—that deliberated on the work of 16 writers, all nominated by peers who consider them the “essential visual art journalist[s] working in [their] part of the country.” I’m truly excited to help the foundation support these thinkers:
Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles)
LA Weekly arts editor
Bryn Evans
Decatur, Georgia
Poet, frequent contributor to Burnaway
Joe Fyfe
New York City
Painter, writer
Peter L’Official
Harlem & Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Poet, educator
Stacy Pratt
Tulsa
Writer, musician, poet
Darryl F. Ratcliff, II
Dallas
Artist, poet, arts writer
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin
Sightlines editor
Margo Vansynghel
Seattle
Crosscut arts reporter
Congratulations to all! And thanks to Rabkin executive director Susan Larsen for including me, and to fellow jurors, Eric and Sasha!