ARTnews senior editor Maximilíano Durón has been named one of this year’s winners of the Rabkin Prizes for Visual Arts Journalism.
The award is given by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation and is worth $50,000 for each of the recipients. The 2023 announcement also noted that executive director Susan C. Larsen will be retiring this fall and that journalist and filmmaker Mary Louise Schumacher will take over the role in October.
Prior to her appointment, Larsen was an Arts and Culture Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2017 as well as the art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for more than 18 years.
The Rabkin Prize started in 2017 and has given $3.25 million to 62 individual art writers so far. Artist Leo Rabkin worked and exhibited in New York City for six decades before he died in 2015 at the age of 95. Leo and his wife Dorothea built a notable art collection as well as a community of artists, writers, and curators in and out of the city.
A statement for this year’s prize noted that Rabkin “had many friends among the city’s art journalists and, even in his nineties, was an avid reader of the art press.”
Durón has been at ARTnews since April 2014. In addition to managing coverage of art fairs, film, and the annual Top 200 Collectors list, Durón’s writing and reporting on contemporary art focuses on the work of artists of color, queer artists, and their intersections.
A queer, Chicanx journalist and critic, he was born and raised on the Eastside of Los Angeles, and is currently based in New York. Durón studied journalism and art history at New York University and is a founding member of Critical Minded, an initiative that looks to support the work of a diverse, intergenerational group of cultural critics of color.
The other Rabkin Prize winners for 2023 are Erin Joyce for Arizona; Eileen G’Sell in St. Louis; Jori Finkel in Los Angeles; Harmony Holiday in Los Angeles; Annette LePique in Chicago); Darla Migan in New York; Jillian Steinhauer in New York; and San Francisco’s Rebecca Solnit, the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many other books.