Sarah Lewis wins 2026 Rabkin Prize for visual arts writers

Sarah Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American Studies, has been selected for the 2026 Rabkin Prize. Lewis is one of eight U.S. visual arts writers to receive the award this year.  

“The Rabkin Prize is such a profound honor,” said Lewis, who described the prize as a “transformational gift” that will support work on two book projects.  

Those projects include “Vision & Justice,” forthcoming from Random House in 2027, and “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law,” expected in 2028. The latter title will explore how visual artists such as Hank Willis Thomas and Amy Sherald, as well as landmarks like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, interrogate the meaning of “ground” in the era of stand-your-ground laws across the U.S.   

“These works prompt the question: Who has a right to the ground? What does it mean to not be able to stand your ground?” Lewis said. “What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life?” 

Lewis said she is “stunned” that it has been artists, rather than lawyers and legal scholars, who have led the nation in reckoning with these questions. She credited these artists with “creating a contemporary phenomenon of ‘groundwork’ — both as practical labor for civic society, and as a prompt for vital methodological inquiry in the arts and humanities at large.” 

The Rabkin Prize, given annually by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, comes with $50,000 to reward the intellectual contributions of each awardee. Winners are selected by a jury of arts professionals from a pool of nominations. 

It’s been a busy month for Lewis. On September 10, she launched an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago titled “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground.” The show, which she curated in collaboration with Till’s cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr., invites viewers to imagine Till’s life had he not been murdered at age 14. Lewis was also named to TIME Magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People in Art and selected as an American Academy in Rome residentfor 2027.