Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation

04/22/2026

We are guided by Leo Rabkin’s distinct appreciation for the textures and vibrancy of our world. Happy Earth Day. 

Grouping of mixed media works by Leo Rabkin, 1964-1993 (mixed materials, thread, yarn, stitching, collage, watercolor, fabric, flocking, beads, shells, and other found materials).

04/17/2026

We are extending the deadline for this year’s Rabkin Travel Grant to Thursday, April 23 at 11:59p. 

Our grant provides up to $500 to offset travel expenses for visual arts journalism assignments. If you are an active visual arts journalist with a confirmed or pending assignment that requires travel, you are likely eligible. 

If the application doesn’t load on your phone, we recommend opening it on a desktop or in a different browser. Still having trouble? Please DM us.

11/26/2025

There is a singular kind of joy in expanding a library, particularly created by and for arts writers. Our library is a testament to the generosity of spirit we find in our community – and another reason to visit us in Portland, Maine. 

We love adding books to our shelves and inscribing each book with the names of the writers who nominated the titles. Here are a few recent additions… 

10/13/2025

Brandy McDonnell is a winner of the 2025 Rabkin Prize. She travels the state of Oklahoma covering the arts and writes from her home office in Lindsay, near where she grew up. Our Rabkin Interview with Brandy drops on Wednesday.

To read more about Brandy, an award-winning features journalist for The Oklahoman, visit her bio page at our website and subscribe to the Rabkin Interviews on our Substack. Both can be found at our link in bio.

The commissioned portraits of this year’s winners in the spaces where they work are by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. 

09/05/2025

Please help us celebrate the eight writers who have just joined the community of Rabkin Prize winners and take a behind-the-scenes peek at artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki making portraits of this year’s cohort in the spaces where they write.

Next week, our interviews with this year’s winners begin publishing on Wednesdays. You can subscribe to the Rabkin Interviews on Substack and podcasting platforms.

The 2025 Rabkin Prize winners are Tempestt Hazel, a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center; Jessica Lynne, a writer, critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK; Nicole Martinez, a writer and deputy director of Fountainhead Arts; Brandy McDonnell, a features writer for The Oklahoman; America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), a writer, artist, curator, and publishing editor of First American Art Magazine; Eva Recinos, an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer; Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation), an author, essayist, and curator; and J Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and sound healer.

To read more about these writers, visit our website: https://www.rabkinfoundation.org/2025-rabkin-prize-winners
c.smith.963 .hazel America Meredith Art .recinos.7 Brandy Bam McDonnell

09/04/2025

At a time of precarity for the arts writing field, the Rabkin Prize celebrates the essential work of journalists who are at the heart of our most essential conversations, help us think together in public, create the original field research for art history, and bear witness to the essential work of artists.

The 2025 Rabkin Prize winners are Tempestt Hazel, a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center; Jessica Lynne, a writer, critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK; Nicole Martinez, a writer and deputy director of Fountainhead Arts; Brandy McDonnell, a features writer for The Oklahoman; America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), a writer, artist, curator, and publishing editor of First American Art Magazine; Eva Recinos, an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer; Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche Nation), an author, essayist, and curator; and J Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and sound healer.

To all of this year’s winners, congratulations, and thank you for the work you do.

Portraits by Kevin J. Miyazaki.

Paul Chaat Smith
Tempestt Hazel
America Meredith Art
Eva Recinos
Jenna Wortham
Brandy Bam McDonnell
Kevin J. Miyazaki
Mary Louise Schumacher

05/19/2025

On a recent rainy evening, we shared our backstory publicly for the first time in our hometown. Susan C. Larsen, our founding and emeritus executive director, introduced her dear friends Dorothea and Leo Rabkin to a packed room at Mechanics’ Hall. The lecture was both scholarly and deeply personal. We learned about an enduring love story of more than 50 years, a landmark collection of folk art, and of course, Leo’s inspired and experimental art practice. To mark the occasion, we gathered in our gallery for a reception where Edgar Beem, our board member in Maine, gave a wonderful toast. Thank you to all who joined us. We are grateful to be building community around our work and couldn’t do it without you. 

Our headquarters in Portland, Maine, is home to a destination gallery for the work of Leo Rabkin, one of the best American artists you’ve never heard of. Please come visit. 

.hudson.50

04/17/2025

12/18/2024

12/16/24 LOST DOG - MILFORD, ME

Charlie is missing from his County Road home in Milford, ME. Charlie is a 5month old, intact male, Sheltie, weighing 7lbs. Charlie is sable and white in color and wearing a collar. If you see Charlie, please CALL Jake at (207) 631-9315.

Animal Orphanage (Old Town, Maine)

12/18/2024

We asked Rabkin Prize winners to share their best reads of 2024. Here’s what Amanda Fortini, a 2020 awardee, recommends: 

This year, I steeped and re-steeped myself in the literature of Las Vegas (“Air Guitar,” by Dave Hickey; “Learning From Las Vegas,” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour; “Fear and Loathing” by Hunter S. Thompson) for the nonfiction book I’m writing about the city. I also revisited Gretel Ehrlich’s “The Solace of Open Spaces” (Viking Penguin Inc, 1985), her seminal essay collection about Wyoming. To my mind, the book is a model for anyone writing about place.

Among the recreational reading I did, Dorothy Baker’s “Cassandra at the Wedding” (Victor Gollancz, 1962), reprinted by NYRB Classics in 2004 and 2012, stands out. It’s the most original novel I’ve read in ages, with an afterword by the great Deborah Eisenberg. The story follows the charming, brilliant, but reckless 24-year-old Cassandra over one summer weekend as she returns to the hothouse environment of her family’s ranch for her twin sister Judith’s wedding. Let’s just say chaos ensues. Someone on social media affectionately called it a “staple crazy girl book” – a genre of which I count myself a superfan. Another favorite, Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection, “Bad Behavior” (Poseidon Press, 1988), belongs to a subset of the category: the naughty-young-woman novel. To her readers’ immense delight, Gaitskill has been writing essays of late; this summer, in Granta, she published “The Pneuma Illusion,” an uncanny piece about the vagaries of healing and the often messy dynamic between patient and practitioner. 

A latecomer to my list is Greg Gerke’s “The Response to Art is Everything,” published last month in Liberties (where a harrowing 2023 essay by Gaitskill, “The Trials of the Young: A Semester,” about the despair she witnessed among students she taught, also appeared). Art, Gerke argues, “makes” us, becoming “a part of our consciousness’ stream,” changing our very perceptions – as all these works have done for me. “Artworks don’t want to be solved,” Gerke writes, “They want to be lived in.” Yes.

Link in bio for more A Year in Reading recommendations.