Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergicis one of two recipients of the Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rabkin Foundation. Recognized as an arts writer who has “had a generational impact on the field,” Vartanian and fellow recipient, feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard, have each received an unrestricted cash prize of $50,000.
The foundation, which began presenting awards to visual arts writers in 2017, described Vartanian and Lippard as “two groundbreaking writers who have shaped the way we think about art and its social and political contexts.”
Vartanian’s award coincides with Hyperallergic‘s 15th year as an independent art publication. Co-founded in 2009 by Vartanian and his wife, publisher Veken Gueyikian, Hyperallergic has shifted the standard of arts journalism away from market-driven reporting in favor of platforming marginalized, diasporic, underrepresented, and disenfranchised perspectives that champion equality, justice, and culturally informed criticism for a global audience.
Born to an Armenian family in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Toronto, Canada, Vartanian earned his master’s degree in art history from the University of Toronto and worked in Beirut, Lebanon, before moving to New York City and immersing himself in the arts and art history. writing scenes.
Current executive director of the Rabkin Foundation and former journalist Mary Louise Schumacher noted in a statement that Vartanian is an “independent writer who pursued ideas that were not always embraced by the broader art world.” The foundation specifically highlighted its function in collecting journalistic and research-based sources on the threat to Armenian cultural heritage in the now forcibly dissolved Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region in 2021, as well as its mural for Gaza: “Forbidden sign protest” (2023), at the front of the Home Gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown, late October 2023.
The foundation also highlighted the role of the Hyperallergic Podcast, hosted by Vartanian and featuring numerous guests (including Lippard himself), in broadening the horizons of arts journalism beyond publishing, as well as Vartanian’s curatorial efforts to embrace the intersection of new media and exploring and building virtual communities in the early 2010s.
In addition to her feminist advocacy for the arts, the foundation recognized Lippard’s activism the fronts of class, gender and racial equality in cultural institutions, as well as her organization for arts and culture workers against US intervention in Central America.
Lippard receives the Lifetime Achievement Award after writing thirty books throughout her career, in addition to numerous reviews, essays and articles, and spearheading groundbreaking curatorial projects in feminist, political, conceptual and ecological art. Lippard appeared on the scene in the 1960s, combining dozens of gallery and studio visits per week. In 1971, Lippard made a great impression as curator of the historical exhibition Twenty-six contemporary women artists at the Aldrich Art Museum in Connecticut. The exhibition’s influence continues to resonate in curatorial and literary efforts to this day, and a revival in 2022 reflected the exhibition’s lasting impact on feminist art.
Lippard and Vartanian join previous Lifetime Achievement Award winners such as the New Yorker‘s late art critic Peter Schjeldahl, Cristopher Ridder of the Los Angeles Timesformer New York Times critic Roberta Smith and Maine arts writer Hyperallergic contributor Carl Little.
“They are vanguards,” Schumacher said of Lippard and Vartanian. “They have shown the field how central art writing can be to our most critical, collective conversations and have both inspired a new generation of arts writers.”
