The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has announced the nine winners of its 2023 Rabkin Prize for Journalism in the Visual Arts. Among this year’s winners are Hyperallergic contributors Erin Joyce And Eileen G’Sell as well as former editor Jillian Steinhauer, who each received $50,000 for their work. A full list of recipients can be found here.
Founded in 1999 by New York artist Leo Rabkin and his partner Dorothea, the foundation works to advance the field of visual arts with support from the Rabkin Estate. This year was the charity’s seventh annual Rabkin Prize installment. Each year, 16 sponsors involved in the visual arts across the country nominate candidates. Applicants then submit two recently published articles along with a short statement of references for consideration. Since 2017, the foundation has awarded more than $3 million to 62 visual arts writers. Previous recipients include Hyperallergic critic John Yau, former editor Jasmine Weber and contributor and former editor Seph Rodney.
This year was the first win for G’Sell, a poet and cultural critic who was previously nominated for the award in 2019. A professor of poetry and rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, G’Sell also teaches creative writing for the Prison Education Project at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center. In 2012, she co-founded The Hinge, an experimental art space and gallery in St. Louis, alongside colleagues Lauren Pressler and Bryan Laughlin. She received the American literary journal poetry prize in 2013.
As a writer and curator of contemporary art, Joyce has curated over 35 exhibitions for museums, galleries and other art spaces throughout her career. As an arts journalist, she focuses on artists and exhibitions in the Southwest and Midwest of the United States. Earlier this month, she interviewed Oklahoma artist Raven Halfmoon for Hyperallergic on the first major solo exhibition of his large-scale sculpture work, Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. Joyce was also nominated for the Rabkin Prize in 2019.
Steinhauer, who worked at Hyperallergic from 2012 to 2017, is a Brooklyn-based journalist whose writing primarily focuses on the intersection of art and politics. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writer Fellowship, which supports emerging and established visual arts writers. Steinhauer currently teaches in the journalism and design program at The New School in New York.
In addition to providing national grants to arts journalists, the Rabkin Foundation also provides philanthropic support to cultural organizations and works to preserve and distribute works of art created by Leo Rabkin. During their lifetime, the Rabkins lived in Chelsea, where they amassed a considerable collection of folk and so-called “foreign” art that was eventually donated to the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Atlanta, and other institutions. Leo has received further recognition for his colorful watercolor and unique box designs constructed of plastic, wood and gathered materials. His personal works are now on permanent display at the foundation’s headquarters, located at 13 Brown Street in Portland, Maine, and are part of the permanent collections of several institutions across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
