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, where she was intimately involved in exploring new models of journalism and practiced a form of community-based journalism. In 2024, Mary Louise completed a documentary film about art critics, more than a decade in the making, called Out of the Picture. The film has screened at festivals around the world and received several jury prizes. It continues to be screened in community-based settings, prompting conversations about how to sustain and inspire the next generation of arts journalists. Mary Louise was also 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. In addition to leading the foundation, she hosts the Rabkin Interviews podcast and writes the Rabkin Reader newsletter, a digest of great arts writing and an exploration of thought leadership about the field.
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 for 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 nearly 2,400 artworks. 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, pursued freelance photography, and spent time working and teaching with a nonprofit overseas.
Cindy Eggert Johnson is the program manager and audience development strategist for The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. As the newest member of the Rabkin team, Cindy has helped the foundation develop and produce an expanded audience development plan, including establishing the Rabkin Reader, our Substack newsletter, and the Rabkin Interviews, a podcast of interviews with Rabkin awardees. Cindy also provides essential support for new programs we are developing for arts writers and the field. Previously, Cindy launched her own communications agency, which followed more than two decades in print journalism, including with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and St. Paul Pioneer Press, where she was an editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation. Her agency focused on digital, print, and videography content, which led her to direct three independent documentaries whose protagonists are creative women. Cindy is a Wisconsin native. Her career took her to Colorado and Minnesota, before she settled back in her home state. When she is not helping the foundation, Cindy gets her hands dirty growing and selling thousands of flowers each season on a 5-acre flower farm in the state’s picturesque Driftless Region.
Board of Trustees
President
Nancy Karlins Thoman, Ph.D.
Art historian, critic, New York City
Nancy Thoman, writing as N.K. Karlins, is an art critic who trained in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She received her Ph.D from New York University. Her dissertation was one of the first on what has historically been termed self-taught or Outsider artists.
After working for several newspapers in New York City and working as a guest curator, she taught art history and American Studies at Ramapo College. After a detour to Wall Street, she returned to freelance criticism, becoming a regular contributor to Artnet from 1997 to 2012. Thoman also writes for galleries. A recent publication was an obituary for Melvin "Milky" Way in the Raw Vision (Summer 2024), an Outsider artist about whom she wrote the first major article.
Thoman is a founding board member of the Rabkin Foundation and is currently president.
When not looking at art or thinking about art, she can usually be found doing tai chi or listening to classical music. Thoman is a certified associate instructor in the International Yang Family Tai Chi Chuan Association. She is also the co-founder of the Gustav Mahler Society of New York.
Secretary
Edgar Allen Beem
Author, critic, columnist, Brunswick, Maine
Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer who lives in Brunswick, Maine. A former art critic for Maine Times, he has written about art and culture in the state since 1978. He has been a frequent contributor to Down East, Yankee, and Photo District News, and he has written for the Boston Globe Magazine, ARTnews, Design New England, Maine Boats & Harbors, Conde Nast’s Traveler, and Teacher. He is the author of Maine Art Now and Maine: The Spirit of America. From 2003 until 2024 he wrote a weekly opinion column titled “The Universal Notebook,” first for The Forecaster and then for the Portland Phoenix. His self-published novel, The Russian Lesson, appeared in 2020.
Beem won the 1988 Manufacturers Hanover Art/World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism for a feature article on the 1987 auction sale of Vincent van Gogh's Irises. He also won 2002 and 2013 Merit Awards from the International Regional Magazine Association for stories in Down East. He is a founding member of the board.
Treasurer
AX Mina
An arts writer, media expert, nonprofit consultant and filmmaker
AX Mina is dedicated to exploring the role of the arts in healing and liberation. AX has written on arts, media and culture for publications such as Hyperallergic, The Economist, The Atlantic, and Nieman Journalism Lab, and has spoken in venues including the Aspen Institute, re:publica, and Harvard Law School. Her creative practice has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Brooklyn Museum. AX's newest co-authored book, The Hanmoji Handbook (MITeen Press, 2022), was named a Best Book of the Year from Kirkus Reviews.
She is a current Senior Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Lab, a 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and a 2013 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow. AX is a certified trauma-informed yin yoga teacher and is working on a documentary about queer Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye. AX joined the Rabkin Foundation’s board in 2024.
Board member
rashid shabazz
Philanthropic and cultural leader, Executive Director of Critical Minded
rashid shabazz, a journalist, cultural leader, and advocate, serves as executive director of Critical Minded, a grantmaking and advocacy initiative launched by the Ford and Nathan Cummings foundations to invest in critics of color and strengthen the field of cultural criticism in the U.S. Previous to his current role, rashid was the chief marketing and storytelling officer at Color of Change, vice president of communications at the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, and program officer for the Open Society Institute. A writer and critic, shabazz received his bachelor’s degree in English from George Mason University and holds master’s degrees in African studies from Yale University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter. rashid joined the Rabkin Foundation’s board in 2024.
Board member
Daniel Reid
Associate Director, Getty Foundation, Los Angeles
Daniel Reid is the associate director of the Getty Foundation, where he leads the grants programming team in developing and implementing funding initiatives to advance the visual arts and heritage around the world. He joined Getty in 2024 from the Whiting Foundation; as Whiting’s first executive director, he oversaw the launch of multiple programs in support of the humanities and literary arts and co-founded an international network of cultural heritage preservation funders. Prior to joining Whiting, Daniel was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company; helped create the City University of New York Institute for Education Policy (now at Johns Hopkins); and provided strategic consulting to nonprofits such as UNESCO, the Gates Foundation, and Illinois Humanities. He also has served as a reviewer or advisor for grant programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Federation of State Humanities Councils, American Council of Learned Societies, New York State Council on the Arts, and Humanities New York. Daniel holds a law degree from Yale Law School and a bachelor of arts from the University of Virginia. He joined the Rabkin Foundation’s board in 2026.
Emeritus Circle
Susan C. Larsen is the founding and emeritus executive director of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Susan single handedly 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.
Deborah Irmas is the former treasurer of the Rabkin Foundation board and one of its founding members. She is a writer, curator, and collector with a master’s in art history from Boston University. She taught the history of art and photography at the University of Southern California, UCLA, and Orange Coast College, and curated an exhibition of the photographer William Mortensen (1897-1965). This led to stints as a visiting curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and as the interim director of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (now defunct). Irmas built a collection of photographic self-portraits dating from 1852 to the present that her family donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has continued building the collection, emphasizing works by women and people of varying origins and ethnicities. In the 1990s, Irmas lived in Paris, where she wrote art reviews for frieze, Art+Auction, and Artforum. When she returned to LA, she advised clients on collecting art until she got more involved in philanthropy. Today she is a trustee for The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation and The Crossed Purposes Foundation, as well as the Rabkin Foundation. When she is not in front of a computer, she can be seen walking her Boston terrier, Charlie, practicing Pilates, or boxing.