Our space
The headquarters of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation is located in the heart of the arts district in Portland, Maine, near the Maine College of Art, the Portland Museum of Art and other cultural institutions. We hope our gallery and study center can be a gathering place for anyone interested in the practice of writing on art today, as well as those interested in the inventive, varied and unexpected artworks of the artist Leo Rabkin, artworks that are represented in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions. We are ready to host visitors or groups of all kinds by appointment.
Mary Louise Schumacher
Mary Louise Schumacher is the executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. She is a veteran journalist who has been uniquely focused on the research and support of the field of visual arts journalism for many years. She was the longtime art and architecture critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Arts & Culture Fellow with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2017, and the Clarice Smith Distinguished Critic at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019. While a Nieman Fellow, she conducted a national survey of arts writers across the country, which resulted in a series of articles for Nieman Reports about the priorities and challenges of the field. After leaving daily journalism in 2019, Schumacher collaborated on a journalism-art project about citizenship and democracy, called This is Milwaukee, with artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki, and she focused on the completion of a documentary film about art critics, called Out of the Picture. Mary Louise can be reached at marylouise@rabkinfoundation.org.
Danielle Yovino
Danielle Yovino is the gallery manager and curator of the collection for the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. She has been involved in caring for and shaping the legacy of Leo Rabkin since the early days of the foundation and has curated or co-curated all of the exhibits of his work organized in our Portland gallery and office. She spent more than a year researching and documenting the inventory of Leo Rabkin’s work, creating a comprehensive database of more than 3,000 works. Danielle is passionate and knowledgeable about Leo Rabkin’s work and life and leads insightful discussions for visitors to our space. Danielle grew up in mid-coast Maine and lives with her husband and daughter in Brunswick, where the family runs a small oyster farm. Danielle is an artist with a BFA in ceramics from the Maine College of Art, where she was involved in a variety of exhibitions, including a thesis show featuring a large-scale installation with 80 of her wheel-thrown porcelain vessels. Danielle has also previously assisted a local ceramist and metalsmith, worked at a local gallery, done freelance photography, and spent time working and teaching with a nonprofit overseas. Danielle can be reached at dfrye@rabkinfoundation.org.
Susan C. Larsen
Susan C. Larsen is the founding and emeritus executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Susan developed the Rabkin Prize, which honors excellence in arts writing, and established the Portland headquarters of the foundation, where the legacy of Dorothea and Leo Rabkin is celebrated, studied, and preserved.
Susan met Dorothea and Leo Rabkin in 1972 while doing research on the American Abstract Artists group for her doctoral thesis at Northwestern University. She documented Leo Rabkin’s long tenure as the group’s president, a period of several decades when he brought younger artists on as members. Her close friendship with the Rabkins continued throughout their lives.
Susan was also a professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles from 1975 to 1996, and she was the curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1988 to 1991. Susan moved to Maine with her husband, Lauri Robert Martin, in 1996, and she served as the chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. She also worked as a regional collector of documents for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.