Rabkin Foundation Names Award Recipients including a Winner From Miami

Rabkin Prize winner Nicole Martinez at her home in Miami. (Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki/The Rabkin Foundation)

Eight visual arts journalists have been awarded the Rabkin Prize, including a recipient from Miami, which celebrates the creative and intellectual contributions of today’s arts writers and comes with a $50,000 unrestricted award.

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

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.

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.

In a personal statement, Martinez of Miami wrote:

“After spending more than a decade writing from my little corner of the tropics—wondering whether this work even mattered to anyone—receiving this level of validation is daunting. I am eternally grateful to Leo and Dorothea Rabkin for creating a foundation that celebrates the contributions of arts writers and recognizes their place within a healthy arts ecosystem.”

Nicole Martinez talks with Mary Louise Schumacher, executive director of the Rabkin Foundation. (Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki/The Rabkin Foundation)

She also spoke of her role at Fountainhead Arts, the artist in residency that Kathryn and Dan Mikesell founded in 2008, and where she serves as deputy director.

“In my writing and in my role at Fountainhead, I am most moved by the stories and histories of the artists whose work helps us understand the world around us. Documenting their intellectual and artistic production is a duty I carry out with pride and with care. My motivation to keep going is ever stronger. . . ”

This is the ninth cycle of the Rabkin Prize, which has now awarded nearly $4 million since it was inaugurated in 2017.

In 2022, Michelle F. Solomon, editor and visual arts writer at Artburstmiami, was nominated for the prestigious Rabkin Prize. In 2020, Artburstmiami writer Elisa Turner won the Rabkin Prize.

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.

The Rabkin Interviews podcast will publish on Wednesdays, starting Sept. 10, on Substack, podcasting platforms, and its website.

This year’s jurors were: Hua Hsu, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Stay True: A Memoir,” which was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and earned a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022;  Joanne McNeil, a writer and editor, who was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer in 2015. McNeil has been a resident at Eyebeam and a recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and Jessica Bell Brown, a curator, writer, and arts leader, currently serving as the executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation is based in Portland, Maine and is home to a destination gallery space where the art and archives of Leo Rabkin (1919-2015), a school teacher, art collector and artist, are open to the public. Leo Rabkin was known especially for color-saturated watercolors and his inventive box constructions in plastic, wood and found materials. The foundation was created in 1999 and received a significant bequest from the estate of Leo Rabkin, including most of the artistic works he created during his lifetime.