$50,000 GRANT IS AWARDED TO A NEW GENERATION OF VISUAL ARTS WRITERS WHO ARE “CHANGING THE DISCOURSE ACROSS OUR NATION”
KQED Visual Arts Editor Sarah Hotchkiss was named one of eight winners of the 2019 Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation’s grant awards. Aimed at recognizing the excellent work of visual arts journalists around the country—and helping those writers and reporters achieve long careers in their fields—the prize is a personal grant for $50,000 from the Portland, Maine-based foundation.
A distinguished group of sixteen visual arts specialists, working in all parts of the country, nominated the eight winners. According to Rabkin Foundation Executive Director Susan C. Larsen, the grant program aims to recognize the work of art journalists who “are changing the discourse across our nation.”
“It’s very surreal,” says Hotchkiss. “After years of watching so many writers and artists move away, the award makes it possible for me to think about staying in the Bay Area in the long term, and keep covering the scene I love.”
Two of her KQED Arts stories were provided to the jurors: a report on the elimination of curatorial positions at several Bay Area art institutions, and a review of the late painter Harvey Quaytman’s exhibition Against the Static at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.