Mark Lamster, architecture critic of The News, is one of 8 who wins the $50,000 Rabkin Prize

Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster was honored Thursday by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, which named Lamster and seven other visual arts journalists the recipients of the $ 50,000 award.

This is the fifth cycle of the Rabkin Prize, which began in 2017. Based in Portland, Me., The foundation has awarded a total of $ 2.275 million to individual art writers across the country over its five years.

“It is really wonderful that there is a foundation that supports literary writers right now, and I am immensely grateful for this extraordinary support and for being considered alongside so many other wonderful colleagues,” said Lamster, the first award winner who mainly writes about architecture.

Arts and entertainment editor Christopher Wynn described Lamster as “fearless” and said whether he explores the history of the built city in a long narrative or advocates progressive urban design: “Mark writes with clarity, intelligence and great compassion.”

Lamster joined The News in 2013. He is also Professor at the University of Texas School of Architecture at Arlington and a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His acclaimed biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. The New York Times called the book “stimulating and vibrant.”

Lamster chaired a panel discussion at Fair Park for the Dallas Festival of Ideas in 2016. (Ashley Landis / photographer)

Lamster, 51, graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Tufts University. The New York native lives in Dallas with his wife, Anna Kuchment, a science writer for The News, and their daughter, Eliza.

“We are delighted that the Foundation recognizes Mark and his exceptional contribution to visual arts journalism,” said Keith Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of The News. “His expertise, his reporting and his writing enrich our website and our newspaper.”

The Rabkin Prize follows Lamster’s win several other important awards:

– At the recent National Headliner Awards, one of the oldest and most prestigious competitions in the media industry, Lamster won first place for his columns on architecture.

– The Headliners Foundation honored Lamster’s story “Reckoning with Joppa” about the historic city of freedmen with a certificate of merit. According to Richter, the play is “a unique form of storytelling, a combination of storytelling, journalistic investigation and critical writing.”

– In the recent Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Awards recognizing the work of newspapers across the state, Lamster won first place in feature writing and second place for the Michael Brick Storytelling Award, both for his work on the history of the breed in Dallas. It also won first place for comment and criticism.

Others who will receive the Rabkin Prize 2021 are:

Aruna D’Souza, writer and art critic based in western Massachusetts; John Yau, a New York-based poet, novelist, and critic; Raquel Gutiérrez, art critic, poet, and educator from Arizona; Jarrett Earnest, a New York-based artist, writer, and curator; Yinka Elujoba, a New York based Nigerian writer and art critic; Jennifer Huberdeau, editor of The Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts; and Jasmine Weber, a writer, editor, and artist from Long Island, New York who now lives in Brooklyn.

The award is named after the late Leo Rabkin, an artist who worked and exhibited in New York City for 60 years, and his wife Dorothea, who with her husband created “a seminal collection of American folk and outsider art.”

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