Rabkin Team
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. She also completed a documentary film about art critics, called Out of the Picture, in 2024.
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 bachelor’s degree 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.
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.
Susan is the author of many articles, museum catalogues and books, and she has been a frequent lecturer at museums and universities across the country and abroad. Susan currently lives in South Portland.
Board of Trustees
President:
Nancy Karlins Thoman, Ph.D.
Art historian, critic, New York City
Secretary:
Edgar Allen Beem
Author, critic, columnist, Brunswick, Maine
Treasurer:
Deborah Irmas
Author, critic, curator, Los Angeles
rashid shabazz
Philanthropic and cultural leader, Executive Director of Critical Minded
AX Mina
An arts writer, media expert, nonprofit consultant and filmmaker