Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Brooke Kamin Rapaport is Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator of Mad. Sq Art at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City, a position she has held since the summer of 2013.^[1] She is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists. Rapaport also writes for Sculpture magazine where she is a contributing editor. Rapaport lives in New York City.

Education

Rapaport was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Amherst College in 1984 and a Master of Arts in Art History from Rutgers University in 1988. Rapaport was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Museum Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City.

Career

Rapaport was the assistant curator (1989 to 1993) and associate curator (1993 to 2002) of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. She organized numerous exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogues for Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940–1960^[2] (with Kevin L. Stayton), and Twentieth Century American Sculpture at the White House: Inspired by Rodin (1998, with colleagues)^[3] She also realized exhibitions with contemporary artists in the Grand Lobby series of installations including Houston Conwill,Leon Golub,Komar and Melamid, and Meg Webster.

As guest curator at The Jewish Museum in New York City, Rapaport organized The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend,^[4] a 2007 survey exhibition that traveled to The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young. A catalogue published by Yale University Press accompanied the Nevelson exhibition and was named best Editors' Picks in the Arts and Photography books of 2007 by Amazon.com.^[5] The volume also won the New York State Historical Association's Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts in 2009.^[6]

Rapaport organized Houdini: Art and Magic at The Jewish Museum in 2010.^[7] The show traveled to venues in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Madison, Wisconsin. Yale University Press published the exhibition catalogue.

She is a contributing editor and writer for Sculpture magazine and has published articles on artists including contemporary plant artists, Alice Aycock, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Melvin Edwards, R.M. Fischer, DeWitt Godfrey, Louise Nevelson, John Newman, Judy Pfaff, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. She authored a blog on artists' materials and processes for the International Sculpture Center. Her essay, Why Calder is Back: A Modern Master's Creative Reuse of Materials was included in the exhibition catalogue Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

At Madison Square Park Conservancy, Rapaport has organized outdoor projects with contemporary artists including Tony Cragg,^[8] Teresita Fernández,^[9] Paula Hayes,^[10] Giuseppe Penone,^[11] and Martin Puryear.^[12]

She serves on the boards of Socrates Sculpture Park, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

References

External links

• Sculpture magazine