2024 Rabkin Prize winner TK Smith

TK Smith is an arts writer, cultural historian, and the newly appointed curator of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. He is one of eight writers to win the 2024 Rabkin Prize. For the first time in the prize’s history, the Rabkin Foundation commissioned portraits of the winners in the spaces where they write and conducted interviews with them about their lives and ideas. Here is Mary Louise Schumacher, a longtime journalist and the foundation’s new executive director, in conversation with TK. It has been gently edited for length and clarity. 

Mentioned in this episode:
Beverly Buchanan, Art Papers, Fall/Winter 2020
Duane Linklater: mymothersside, Frye Art Museum exhibit, 2021
Malcolm Peacock, Studio Museum in Harlem residency, 2024-25
Imani Perry
Monument Lab
“A Boxcar on East 4th Street” by TK Smith (Monument Lab, August 2023)
“A Stage for Aiyyana” by TK Smith (Monument Lab, May 2023)
“The Dirty South” exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
“A Cosmos of Southern Black Expression” by TK Smith (Art in America, July 2021)
Benny Andrews
Michi Meko
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories Press, 2005)
Christopher Robert Jones
Blue by Derek Jarman
KJ Abudu
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom (Hatchett Book Group, 2018) 
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks (The New Press, 1995)
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa (Aunt Lute Books, 1987)

This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners. The production team for the Rabkin Interviews includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer, and Johnathon Olsen, editor. Music by Ariel Shalom, Flint, Sémø and Just for Kicks. These interviews are accompanied by newly commissioned portraits of these writers made by Kevin J. Miyazaki in the spaces where they work.