Prize Winner 2023:
Maximiliano Durón

Maximilíano Durón is a queer, Chicanx journalist and critic covering contemporary art. Born and raised on the Eastside of Los Angeles, Durón is based in New York. His writing focuses on the work of artists of color, specifically Latinx/Chicanx artists, queer artists, and their intersections. 

Durón has been at ARTnews since April 2014, where he is senior editor, managing the publication’s art fair and Top 200 Collectors coverage. He previously interned at the publication while attending New York University, where he studied journalism and art history. Durón is a founding member of Critical Minded, an initiative that looks to support the work of a diverse, intergenerational group of cultural critics of color. 

For ARTnews, Durón has aggressively covered a series of protests and actions at El Museo del Barrio in Upper Manhattan, issues of diversity and equity within the art world, and the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. He has also written about the work of artists Judith F. Baca, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Teresita Fernández, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lyle Ashton Harris, Laura Aguilar, Edra Soto, Danie Cansino, Yolanda M. López, Margarita Cabrera, Mildred Thompson, Emma Amos, and Julie Mehretu. Other profile subjects include curators Candice Hopkins, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and Adriano Pedrosa; collectors Cheech Marin and Raymond J. McGuire; and poet Elizabeth Alexander. Since 2021, he has published an end-of-year column on the state of Latinx art. 

In 2019 he convened a roundtable panel with artists Vaginal Davis, Michela Griffo, and curator Jonathan Weinberg on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising to discuss its impact on the art world. He later organized a follow-up panel with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, looking at lesbian visibility, with an intergenerational trio of artists: Joan E. Biren (JEB), Lola Flash, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. He continues to moderate panels on a range of topics in the art world, from alternative approaches to the art market to the importance of supporting the work of critics of color.