rabkin foundation

Cassie Packard’s Rabkin Interview Dropped

I know it’s about writing, but I also loved listening to Cassie Packard and Mary Louise Schumacher talk about editing, and Packard’s approach to art show reviews. The story about the college kid Packard was sharing Amy Sillman’s epic 2011 essay, “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls” is also choice. But after teeing up a slew of Packard’s writing in the links I hadn’t known before, my next biggest takeaway from her Rabkin Interview is introducing me to Merve Emre’s podcast, The Critic And Her Publics, which is now filling up my queue.

Cassie Packard 2024 Rabkin Foundation Interview [rabkinfoundation.substack]

Thomas Lawson’s Rabkin Interview Just Dropped

I listened to Thomas Lawson’s conversation with the Rabkin Foundation’s Mary Louise Schumacher on the way home this afternoon. I aspire to accomplishing so much and being so concise I can get it all done in a 31-minute podcast. He should win an editing award on top of the writing.

Lawson mentions his January 1988 essay in Artforum on the history and contemporary resonance of cyclorama paintings, and I just read it. The ending is absolutely eerie in its torn-from-today’s-headline vibe. And by today, I mean not just 1988, but 2024. How is that possible?

I wish I’d known of Lawson’s essay in 2010 when I was writing a series of posts proposing ways of saving Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg, which was under threat of demolition by the National Park Service. TBF I was focused much less on the cyclorama painting—which had already been moved to a new, purpose-built visitor entertainment center—than on how the surviving architecture related to the built and marked history of memorialization on the battlefield. [Spoiler alert: it was destroyed.]

Thomas Lawson 2024 Rabkin Interview [rabkinfoundation.substack]

M.O. Williams, Mo Buddhas

M.O. Williams, Great Buddha, 175 Feet Tall, Bamian, Afghanistan, 1931, gelatin silver print, 7 3/4 x 5 3/4 in., on 14 x 9 in. mount, sold at Christie’s in 2012 by National Geographic

On Tumblr, @pwlanier’s been posting things sold by the National Geographic Society at Christie’s in 2012.

One image that stood out to me was Maynard Owens Williams’ 1931 photo of the Great Buddha at Bamian, one of two monumental sculptures created in the 5th-6th centuries in what is now central Afghanistan.

It stood out because I found myself talking about the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in 2001 in my Rabkin Foundation interview a while back. Which was not something I’d planned or anticipated, tbqh; that fragment had just been lying there in my head, I guess, and I picked it up.

TIL M.O. Williams was the Society’s first field correspondent. He photographed the Buddhas [and this other scene, from Herat in western Afghanistan] on the Citroën-Haardt Expedition, a 7,000-mile trans-Asiatic road trip by motor car, tractor, pony, camel, and yak between Beirut and Beijing. [At the time, the project was known by the more racist title, la Croisière Jaune, the Yellow Expedition.] And French philosopher, Jesuit—and sinopaleontologist??—Pierre Tielhard de Chardin was on the trip, too. Who knew?

Siddhartha Miter’s Rabkin Interview Dropped

I finished listening to Siddhartha Miter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation Executive Director Mary Louise Schumacher this morning, and it was insightful and sobering. They talked a lot about the art writing field and its precarity, and that was as depressing as you can imagine. But they also talked about the windows art writing affords into new, expanded views of the world, beyond the luxury object trade talk we’re inundated with, and it was awesome. Then I’ve been clicking through the sheer number of powerful pieces Miter has written about incredible artists, exhibitions, movements, and publications, and it’s extraordinary. A combination of vast treasure and barely scratching the world’s art surface.

If you need me, I’ll be filling up my reading list, starting with Jupiter Magazine, one of the art publications Miter namechecked. The theme of Jupiter’s latest issue, The Theater of Refusal, revisits and renews Charles Gaines’ foundational 1993 exhibition of contemporary Black art and its critical context. Its form was a series of readings and screenings throughout the summer, which I will now try to approximate in my head.

2024 Rabkin Interview with Siddhartha Miter [rabkinfoundation.substack]
Jupiter [jupiter-mag]

Emily Watlington Rabkin Interview Dropped

It has turned out to be an enlightening pleasure to listen to the interviews with the recipients of this year’s Rabkin Foundation awards, and none moreso than the conversation with Emily Watlington.

I’d already had the pleasure of working with Emily in 2022; she was my editor when I wrote about Mormon Architecture for Art in America, and I became a fan and follower of her writing work as well.

With Mary Louise Schumacher, she talks about some of the nuances and challenges of writing about art and disability. They also talk about Watlington’s attuned sensibilities brought to bear on the Venice Biennale, which purported to bring attention and critical consideration to many historically marginalized artists. Watlington’s diaries and in-depth review reveals that it often did just the opposite.

Rabkin Interview 2024 with Emily Watlington [rabkinfoundation substack]

Whoomp, There It Is: My Rabkin Interview Just Dropped

OK, I have not listened to it myself, but I can already tell from the links included in their post that they left in the part where I cried.

Aaand maybe where I said I quietly boycotted the Hirshhorn while it was wrapped in that Nicholas Party scrim. Love you guys!

[AFTER HEARING IT UPDATE: I llol’d that the Rabkin folks actually used the Hirshhorn clip to announce the interview on their Instagram. Love it. And I forgot that while I did acknowledge my pettiness, I also point out, I’m not wrong. Overall though, I think my favorite quote will be, “Again, with the Manet.” It feels undeniably weird to say, “listen to me!” but it actually turned out OK.]

Rabkin Interviews 2024: Greg Allen [rabkinfoundation.substack]

Holland Cotter Rabkin Interview Dropped A Minute Ago

I got caught up on listening to it pretty quickly last week, but I have been slow to post a link to Holland Cotter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher.

Cotter talked about growing up free range in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and picked the Met for his workplace photo. Which after so many years at the Times, is probably the place he’s written about the most.

Cotter and Schumacher did not talk about his donation of the prize money to the the International Association of Art Critics and the Forge Project, to support emerging and Native American arts writing and fellowships, for which mad respect. [As ARTnews notes, the NY Times prohibits its full-time employees from accepting cash awards, and these days a full-time arts writing job is rarer than even the most generous awards.]

2024 Rabkin Foundation Award Recipient Holland Cotter [rabkinfoundation substack]

Robin Givhan Rabkin Interview Dropped

Technically it was released yesterday, but I just finished listening to the second interview with a 2024 Rabkin Prize recipient, Washington Post critic Robin Givhan.

In addition to her own work and career, Givhan spoke to Mary Louise Schumacher about visiting the Equal Justice Institute’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Birmingham, Alabama; and the same searing kicker in Hilton Als’ profile of André Leon Talley that has stuck with me for 25 years, too.

TK Smith Sets The Rabkin Interview Bar High

And here I thought I could be chill and grateful and just acknowledge the congratulations as they came in, while I processed the shock of being included by the Rabkin Foundation among an inspiring but frankly daunting group of writers, but I guess not.

The first of the series of interviews Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher recorded with this year’s award recipients dropped, and it’s great. Curator, writer, and cultural historian TK Smith talked with Schumacher about hope and repatriation; the unsustainability of art writing; Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins [visited here last year for a NYT story by another Rabkin recipient Siddhartha Mitter]; Derek Jarman’s Blue; and much more.

If they’re all like this, I think I will have to post about each one, including, when the time comes, my own. I hope I make even half as much sense.

The Rabkin Interviews: 2024 Rabkin Prize winner TK Smith [rabkinfoundation]