“Why Public Art?”
MAY 28, 2022
Brooke Kamin Rapaport ’84 is deputy director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York, where she is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists.
Rapaport was awarded a Doctor of Arts honorary degree by Amherst College. See the honorary degree citation read by President Biddy Martin at the Commencement 2022 ceremony.
At her talk, Rapaport was introduced by Samuel Morse, the Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell Professor of the History of Art and Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Hear Rapaport’s talk, “Why Public Art?”:
Transcript
Samuel Morse:
Thank you all for coming, and welcome to the commencement activities for the Amherst class of 2022. It's a great pleasure to have you here today and congratulations to those of you who are members of the graduating class and also to friends and family of the graduates. I am Samuel Morse, Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell professor of the history of art, and Asian languages and civilizations. I also serve as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations here at Amherst. I'm truly delighted to introduce today's speaker. It has been a privilege for me to have known Brooke Kamin Rapaport since I arrived at Amherst, when she was a student in one of my first classes. I must say that was an exceedingly nervous time for me. And it is a privilege for all of us this afternoon to hear her speak about public art. At each Amherst commencement, the college awards honorary doctoral degrees to special invitees in recognition of their outstanding contributions in their field of expertise.
Samuel Morse:
The individuals chosen for this recognition are selected not only for their extraordinary contributions to their specific professional arenas, but also because we believe that the arc of their careers, their vision, and their commitment to excellence are inspirational for our students' own aspirations to make meaningful contributions to society. We are grateful to our honored guests for generously giving public talks during commencement weekend so that we all can hear from them directly about the important work with which they are involved. A few housekeeping items. Please be sure that your phones are on mute. Your questions are welcomed following today's conversation. Please remain in your seat and indicate your desire to ask a question by raising your hand. A staff member will bring you a microphone. We ask that you please refrain from asking your question until you have the microphone in hand, so as to ensure that the rest of the audience can hear you. Also, because of the inclement weather. I am sorry to inform you that the garden party at the president's house this afternoon has been canceled.
Samuel Morse:
Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and chief curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy has been a longtime champion of public art, and in order to increase contact with and appreciation for art by all and the societal impact that results. It is not a coincidence then that the first exhibition my wife and I went to see once we could move about more freely last spring was Ghost Forest by Maya Lin, a haunting installation that commented on the fragility of our environment. Since 2013, Brooke has exposed tens of thousands of people a day to thought-provoking and engaging works of outdoor public art through her extraordinary curation at Madison Square Park, where she has commissioned remarkable public sculptures by artists including Diana al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Leonardo Draw, Teresita Fernández, Maya Lin, Josiah McElheny, Eva Navarro, Giuseppe Penone, Martin Puryear, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The pandemic did not stop Brooke from her mission. She quickly pivoted to and held a series of important conversations with Wodiczko on the impact of monuments and the role they play in our society.
Samuel Morse:
It was really a great pleasure for my wife and me to be able to attend them remotely, but much more moving to see Maya Lin's sculpture in person. In 2019, Brooke was commissioner and curator of the United States Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with the extraordinary exhibition Martin Puryear, Liberty/Liberta. She is the founder of the Public Art Consortium, a national coalition of museum, public art, and sculpture park colleagues that meets yearly to consider collaborations for increasing sculptures' visibility. Prior to joining the Madison Square Park Conservancy. Brooke served as a curator at the Jewish Museum of New York and the Brooklyn Museum where she organized many shows, notably including Houdini: Art and Magic, and the sculpture of Louise Nevelson, Constructing a Legend. A contributing editor and frequent writer for Sculpture magazine, Brooke is a juror and moderator for competitions and discussions on the topic of contemporary art. She serves on numerous boards and has lectured at colleges, museums, and art centers nationwide.
Samuel Morse:
After graduating from Amherst in 1984 with a major in fine arts, Brooke was a Helen Rubenstein fellow in museum studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study program and earned a master's degree in art history from Rutgers University. At Amherst, she has generously served on the advisory board of the Mead Art Museum. She and her husband, Richard, have endowed a lectureship that brings artists and critics to the campus to lecture in contemporary art and to meet with our students. For her talk entitled, Why Public Art, please join me in welcoming Brooke to Amherst again. Thank you.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Thank you, Sam, so much for your generosity to me. You were Elliot Rapaport class of 2016's advisor. So, you are dear to our family, all of us. What a pleasure to be here today. It is such an honor to be on campus, to congratulate the class of 2022, and to encourage you to look closely and deeply at the world. As you follow your vision for the future, take the resplendence of your Amherst education and put it to work, advancing change in the best way for all citizens. This afternoon, I'd like to share ideas on public art and on the lessons we can learn from civic space. But we can't begin without recognizing the surround. We are living in and breathing in perilous times. The adaptability and need for civic sites, college and university campuses, on museum campuses, in cities, in the countryside, that's only heightened across the last two and a half years, confirming the role of open space as a necessity for professors and students, families and communities, artists, protestors, workers, and neighbors.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Our institutions have been stimulated and startled on the essential role of preserving and protecting democracy, of understanding and responding to climate change, of defying violent acts of racism, to stand against the anticipated repudiation of the 1973 Roe versus Wade decision, and to express outrage against gun violence. My role as a curator is to uphold the continued conversation by artists, some of whom use the availability of civic space for collective and private reckoning. How can we take these crushing times and put our practices to work as citizens? And I hope that's a question that we can keep close throughout today's dialogue. I want to start with a flashback to 1983, my senior fall at Amherst, and an experience that must have paved the way for the work I do now as chief curator of the public art program at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City. Here is the front page from the Amherst Student about a sculpture that was installed prominently on campus, adjacent to Fairweather Hall.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
By the early 1980s, great contemporary artists were way past the second and third-generation modernism of this work, Arch Homage Four, dating to 1980. Let's quickly look at three examples of contemporary American sculpture made around the same time. Jeff Koons was suspending basketballs in aquarium tanks and vacuum cleaners in plexiglass cases. Nancy Graves was casting objects and artifacts from nature and everyday life in bronze. Melvin Edwards had realized outdoor work like Homage to Coco, which unites the symbolism of black labor through the physicality of linked chains to the abstract form of the rockers from his grandmother Coco's rocking chair as well as his searing Lynch Fragment series. But Amherst installed an EKG line that looks like a recent visit to the cardiologist. The only heart attacks that came were when students and alums were shocked by, "Why was there a Williams or a Wesleyan W in the heart of the campus? So, you might ask, "What's the responsibility of a college campus to show public art that's new and current, and innovative."
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
It is a responsibility because just as professors are constantly updating their syllabi to adapt to and incorporate new arguments in their fields, the college should have a visual literacy that includes the most visionary artists of our time. So far, Amherst hasn't been on the cutting edge of commissioning public sculpture on campus. A few other examples of public art from the early 20th and early 21st centuries demonstrate that the college missed some critical movements in art making. This is the statue of Noah Webster by Willard D. Paddock. This was installed in 1914, just one year after the Armory Show of 1913 in New York. Now, the Armory Show marked vanguard modernism and rocked the art world. It showed work by Brancusi and Matisse, Duchamp, and many others. But Amherst dedicated this statue of the lexicographer, Noah Webster, that harked back to ancient Greek and Roman draped statuary. Webster lived in Amherst, and he was one of the founders of the Amherst Collegiate Institute, which was a precursor to Amherst College.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
But happily, today's students are updating Noah by layering objects onto him like this Beamo flying hoop. He's also been pressed into a job as a pamphleteer or as a SAGE public health advocate, reminding the campus to mask up during the pandemic. By 2007, when a statue of Robert Frost, the eminent 20th-century poet and Amherst professor, was commissioned by the class of 1957, he joined the campus as a lumpy, black granite figure poised on a pile of boulders. By then the public art field had seen transformation with sculptural materials, video installation, sound art, and figuration that had provoked dialogue on pressing issues in our lives. But one of the most concerning stories of public art on campus is in the form of Sabrina, the four-foot-high seated female muse of Amherst College, a zinc and metal sculpture that came into the collection in 1857. Sabrina has, since that time, become disputed property between the odd and even classes and has endured barbarous acts that have made the metal brittle and fragile, and have caused her recently to undergo extensive conservation with newly affixed appendages made in epoxy resin. She has been marred over the centuries in acts that were long considered a playful rivalry.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Over the years, Sabrina was feted at class banquets, measured and bound by rogue students. She was buried and retrieved, dangled as a hostage from a helicopter over a homecoming football game. To be sure, there are many art historical precedents for a semi-nude nymph, a female figure with scant drapery. Here is a stunning work from a private collection that was on view at the Frick in New York 10 years ago. It's a stunning early Renaissance bronze with fire gilding and silvered eyes by Antico. It dates to 1503. Or this chalk drawing by François Boucher in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, or an 18th-century marble nymph seated by Falconet in the Walters Art Gallery collection in Baltimore. Sabrina as a work of art, her iconography as a nymph, her pose, the material used, can't be considered an important example of mid 19th-century sculpture that was innovative or forward-looking in its day. But her context and the status she has risen to at Amherst warrant further analysis and display.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
So, I hope that you'll agree that it's time to retrieve and restore Sabrina and install her in a prominent site on campus, perhaps at the Mead Art Museum with complete documentation of the manhandling that she has endured for generations, all curiously in the name of fun and campus hijinks. Understood that this is a rural campus with 1000 acres of land, I work in a city where public green space is meager and serves millions of people. The months beginning in March 2020, the start of the pandemic, were desperate. And embedded in those months was also a call to action. So, how can we hold the deep and searing impact of work rather than placing images and experiences as a snapshot of a bygone era? How do we hold that in our mind's eye? And what can publicness teach us? During these months, public art was pressed into action. Citizen artists brought work into the public spaces of cities and parks, and onto historic monuments. Artists adapted to isolation in the studio. Shown here are the black ballerinas, teenagers Ava Holloway and Kennedy George, posing before a performance in front of the 1890 monument to Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Citizen artists spray painted the monument during Black Lives Matter protests. And the monument was removed in September 2021. So, what will be the continued conversation to the overwhelming, immediate output in public space by artists? Artists are utilizing nature, pavement, fencing, the skies for public work. They are using the availability of civic space for collective and private reckoning. Over the past two years of the pandemic, protest, and political turmoil, Madison Square Park has witnessed hyper-local use of the site. Before the pandemic, 60,000 people a day would frequent the park. Today, that number is about 35,000. Families, neighbors, workers, artists, students, athletes, protestors, and travelers have all come to the site and found open space essential to their needs. Many communities experienced the park's flourishing gardens, tended across all seasons, its clean and safe walkways maintained by a skilled operations team, and open lawns that welcome visitors. If Madison Square Park was a site for personal leisure before the pandemic, there has been an uptick in the use of this site as a workspace for outdoor meetings of all kinds.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
So, as the park has affirmed its versatility and beckoned people, the commissioned works of public art proclaim a fundamental need for creativity in a civil society. Works of art can help us interpret great beauty or inspiration, unfathomable aspects of the human experience, or they can make sense of them. And like those parkgoers whose goals for civic space are manifold, the works of art on view in the park demonstrate the polyphony and range of the contemporary art field. The conservancy's public art program brings the range of work made in our time by a diversity of artists with a diversity of materials and meaning, scale and placement, concept and vision, as these most recent projects make clear. I'm going to share some other recent projects with you. Five years ago in 2017, we commissioned White Out by Erwin Redl, an Austrian artist who's based in New York City and Chicago. And he created a light-based work that would be on view during the darkest days of the calendar year. The work was comprised of 900 transparent spheres, each about the size of a baseball and embedded with a discrete white LED light that was suspended from a square grid of steel poles and cabling. These orbs were opportunistic.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
They gently swayed with the wind currents from their position, one foot above the ground. And the spheres were animated both through computer-generated movement and the natural flow from air currents. Parkgoers would crowd around the park's pathways to take in the work. And they were mesmerized. The revered American artist, Martin Puryear installed Big Bling, 40 feet high in 2016 in Madison Square Park. This was the largest temporary outdoor sculpture Puryear had constructed. And it confirms how human experience is central to his work. Big Bling's architectural language suggests a structure that's accessible by ascension through levels. Yet the stories are obstructed by chain link fence, which is a barrier to entry. Puryear wrote this on the occasion of the project, "I see you, New York. I see how you grow and compartmentalize, and stratify. I see how you beckon and promise, and also how you exclude. And crowning it all like a beacon, I see your wealth, your gilded shackle, the golden ring, the bling, the prize, our pride, maybe even success." This monumental work is part animal form, part abstract sculpture, and part intellectual meditation. Martin's signature organic vocabulary appears in this gracefully sinewy outline .. Oops, in an ameboid form in the work's center.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Big Bling was industrially produced at a factory in Upstate New York with laminated plywood. And it's wrapped in that chain link fencing. In 2019, Martin Puryear was selected to represent the US at the 2019 Venice Biennale. And I had the enormous honor to serve as commissioner and curator of Martin Puryear, Liberty/Liberta with Madison Square Park Conservancy as the commissioning institution. This was the first time that an organization whose focus is on public art was selected for what's called the Olympics of the art world. Martin Puryear is a black artist. He was born in 1941, and he grew up in Washington DC in racially segregated Washington DC. His father was a postal worker, and his mother was an elementary school teacher. He became a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1989. Here is the installation process outdoors at the US Pavilion before the exhibition opened. Martin's enduring approach has galvanized his art for more than five decades. Issues of democracy, identity, and liberty have long propelled him.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
So, visitors to the US Pavilion learned how an artist's handling of a symbolic, but vital human subject, namely Liberty, can be best expressed in sculptural form through a visual language of great originality and certitude. Swallowed Sun (Monstrance and Volute) of 2019 refers to the darkness of a solar eclipse or the despair of a conceptual blackout, when values are in jeopardy and citizens are in anguish. He began this work by imagining a view of the pavilion's interior dome and Oculus projected onto a flat vertical plane. And that resulted in the stylized sunburst that you see at the center of the piece. And that has an elliptical central void. So, within the pavilion's forecourt, from that oval opening, springs a flying buttress that resembles the tail of the dragon. Here it is. It's ominous coiled and dark. Our work with Puryear in Venice was a continuation of our work with Puryear in New York City. Back in Madison Square Park in 2019, we commissioned Leonardo Drew's City in the Glass, which was a richly textured, vibrantly colorful, undulating carpet on the Oval Lawn, really a gathering place within the oasis of the park.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Parkgoers located themselves within the rolling planes of the 100-foot-long sculpture. City in the Grass has since traveled to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, and was recently on view in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. And with that tour, new communities have experienced Leonardo Drew's symbol of convening. As Sam mentioned, when New Yorkers began the first days of the pandemic, Krzysztof Wodiczko's Monument, a video project was on view. And it remained up through May of 2020. Wodiczko and Madison Square Park Conservancy collaborated with humanitarian organizations, and 12 refugees resettled in the United States and projected their filmed likenesses and spoken narratives onto the 1881 historic monument to Civil War Admiral, David Glasgow Farragut. Wodiczko chose the Farragut location to underline how select individuals are lionized in wartime while others are overlooked. A response to history and the present, Abigail DeVille's Luminous Light of Freedom opened in 2020. Her work carries cogent symbols. She filled a torch referring to the Statue of Liberty's hand holding a torch, which was on view in Madison Square Park from 1876 to 1882. She filled that torch with a time-worn bell, which is a herald of freedom, and with the arms of blue mannequins. She painted mannequin arms blue, really beseeching viewers.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
And the golden scaffold that you see summoned the glory of labor and the hope that struggle can lead to change. DeVille answered the question of how public art can respond in civic space to a turbulent period. This project, Light of Freedom, traveled to the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. And now, it's on view through mid-July at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, outdoors at the National Mall. This is the picture of it at the Hirshhorn. In Maya Lin's Ghost Forest, dozens of stark and skeletal Atlantic white cedar trees, sourced from a dying forest in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, arrested viewers with their beauty and served as physical stand-ins for the ravages of climate change. We partnered with Natural Areas Conservancy and the artist and gathered volunteers to plant 1000 trees and shrubs in five public parks across the five boroughs of New York City. And that was to offset tenfold, the project's carbon emissions.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
At the conclusion of Ghost Forest, the trees were repurposed. Tri-Lox, a nonprofit in Brooklyn that's a design and fabrication shop specializing in salvaged timber came on site to mill the towering trees. And we also worked with Rocking the Boat in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx. Rocking the Boat is a nonprofit that teaches neighborhood high school students, boat building skills, environmental science, and sailing. So subsequently, students learn how to navigate their vessels on local waterways. Rocking the Boat constructs boats almost exclusively of Atlantic white cedar, the very trees of Ghost Forest. So, this was a great conclusion to Maya's project. Hugh Hayden's Briar Patch closed in New York City earlier this month. And it just opened last week at the North Carolina Museum of Art. It was presented across four lawns in the park. The project included 100 wooden elementary school-style desks that erupt with tree branches, cohering into tangled assemblies with complex and layered meaning. The accumulation of desks summoned the grid arrangement of a traditional classroom. And it was a visually stunning work. It considered opportunity and inequity in the American education system, and the ideal of the American dream.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
And next week, we open Cristina Iglesias' Landscape and Memory. This is an image of the work being fabricated outside of Bilbao, Spain. That's a temporary project, and that's going to place five bronze sculptural pools flowing with water into the park's Oval Lawn. Cristina is based in Madrid, and the project hearkens back to when Cedar Creek, which is now buried underground, coursed across the land where Madison Square Park stands today. This builds on Cristina's practice of unearthing the forgotten and excavating natural history. Landscape and Memory resurfaces in the imaginations of contemporary viewers. The now [inaudible 00:28:46]. The installation conjures the existence of unseen streams that continue to course beneath modern cities, connecting the urban present with a primordial past, and connects us to ideas of what lies just beneath the surface. Temporary outdoor sculpture can present opportunities for vibrant dialogue around aesthetic political and social questions in our culture and our cities, and on our campuses. Public art is a community activity where the private act of looking converges with public habit and ritual to become a collective experience.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
The need for civic space has only heightened over the last two years, confirming the critical role of outdoor sites. And the question we have to ask is, "What will be the continued conversation in the face of the overwhelming and immediate need of public space?" The answer to that question will be found if we heed the artists and heed their work as guideposts pointing the way for us. Thank you. Do we have some questions?
Samuel Morse:
We have a microphone to pass around if people have questions.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
On this last work, is this permanently unearthed? Or was this [inaudible 00:30:39]?
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
This is a temporary piece. It's in bronze. It will be on view through early December, but she is summoning an ancient creek that coursed across Madison Square Park. And Cristina's idea, though ... She's also created a ribbon that connects you from one bronze pool to another bronze pool, and the ribbon is in grasses. So, she's hoping that people, that park goers, will make that physical journey from one object to the next object.
Samuel Morse:
Yes.
Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:31:18] excellent walk-through [inaudible 00:31:22]. But I understand in New York, that they're taking out walls around other parks and that would open up, essentially, tree [inaudible 00:31:30] sidewalk area [inaudible 00:31:32]. Do you know if there's more emphasis throughout the [inaudible 00:31:37] public art?
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
New York City has a percent-for-art program that's managed by the Department of cultural affairs. So, a percentage of each new building that's built, percentage of that budget goes to commissioning new works of art. Those are permanent pieces. Our program is temporary. And then there are many like organizations, Creative Time, the Highline, the Public Art Fund, who also work to commission temporary contemporary art in New York. You might be talking about the former parks commissioner, Mitchell Silver, whose plan for public parks was to take down all of the fences and to make barriers between the street and the park much more malleable for all citizens. He's now gone onto a new position with the ... He was with the de Blasio administration, and there's a new parks commissioner in place. I don't know if that will continue or not.
Jeff Underwood:
Hi, Brooke.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Hi, Jeff.
Jeff Underwood:
Great job. So exciting to see.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Underwood:
There's such diversity here. There's such creativity. What's the context of Madison Square Park Conservancy? And is this the vision of where it was eons ago? Is this a radical rethinking about that space? And is that sort of part of a larger effort?
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Great. Thanks, Jeff. This is my lovely, wonderful classmate, Jeff Underwood, who has a graduate, right? [inaudible 00:33:14]. Congratulations.
Jeff Underwood:
Thank you.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
The park came into being in the mid-19th century, and then saw great despair in the 1970s in New York City due to just no use by that site. And in the late 1990s, the campaign for Madison Square Park began to revitalize this area. In 2004, the first public art projects were commissioned. And since then, so many incredible artists have wanted to have their works be on view in public space. There's no threshold to cross. It's a completely democratic experience for the viewers. Work becomes very vulnerable, but it's also open to interpretation by all citizens, not always museum-going citizens.
Jeff Underwood:
Well, we're seeing a little of that in Boston with the [inaudible 00:34:26], which I don't think originally envisioned as a public park space, but is starting to evolve in that direction, among other things. [inaudible 00:34:35].
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
[inaudible 00:34:38].
Samuel Morse:
Brooke, could you talk to us a little bit about how the artists are selected, what the process is?
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Yeah.
Samuel Morse:
Because you were getting an amazing group of people. I'm lucky enough to get the catalog sent to me. Every time, I think, "Oh, I should be going to New York yet again."
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Our program is curatorially driven. That means that we reach out to the artists to realize new works on-site. It's somewhat different than what you would imagine a competition to be. A competition is when an artist submits proposals for review, but we reach out to an artist, and then ask them to submit a proposal for the space. We present our projects in advance to the community board, to our art committee, internally to our colleagues, to engineers. So, there's much conversation before a work becomes an installation in the site. Yes.
Speaker 6:
Is there any tension in curating a public art installation, if it's publicly viewable and accessible, but in a way privately, curated or put on? [inaudible 00:36:02] it seems like there's a contradiction of sorts there. You also showed the citizen artists, as you called them. And is there a difference in between that and the work that you do?
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
The great thing about working in public space is that people, parkgoers, feel great ownership of the work on view. So, we get emails pretty regularly from those who love the projects. And we also hear that anecdotally, but we get a lot of emails and comments from haters. I think that's about what the public realm should be bringing on. That's the dialogue and the content, and the impact that you want to inspire in the public. So, if there's any tension there, I think it's in parkgoers who become critics. And to me, that's exceptional. And that's what you want this work to inspire in people. [inaudible 00:37:11].
Speaker 7:
First, I have a follow-up [inaudible 00:37:13] Sam's question and some of the others, which is, is there some coordination within the city of other public art [inaudible 00:37:21] as curators talk with one another [inaudible 00:37:24]. You pointed to a number of these moving onto other places. So, is that part of the goal of asking for these creations with a hope that a life continues? Because that seems to be a key part of what you're pointing to.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Right. We have a Public Art Consortium, which is a national initiative of curators who realize public art and museum campuses, sculpture parks, and public art programs across the country. And we come together monthly on Zoom, and then in person for an annual meeting. And then yes, within the city, there's great collegiality amongst the other curators and organizers of public art programs. Our park, Madison Square Park, is a private-public initiative by New York City. So we have to get approval for every exhibition that we do with the Department of Parks. And really, that approval is not aesthetic consideration. It's, "Will someone get hurt? Or, "Is the work structurally sound enough to be able to take 60,000 people a day on that site?" Your question about traveling the projects is great because that is, I think, important to the artist, to be able to take work from one site to another and to transform it physically into a new space, but also so that new viewers can see it and can have that opportunity for more viewing, for additional eyes to get on that work.
Speaker 8:
Thank you. This isn't like a fully formed thought, but I've just been thinking about temporality and transience, especially in your work, and about how projects at this school, more recent ones like the Solidarity Book Project and the Book of Hope have all been temporary. I'm wondering, would it be potentially beneficial to install something that is both progressive, say the Solidarity Book Project, and permanent? Would that offer a level of consistent reminder of these issues? Or is the changing nature of these temporary art allowing us to update and ... I don't know, be more diverse in what we're messaging? I would love to hear your thoughts on, I guess, that question.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Yeah. It's a great question. I think that the temporary nature of a project really mimics a city and a diverse urban center that's constantly in motion, and that's never in stasis. I think that if there's not enough acreage in this park to install permanent monuments, there are already 19th century, historic monuments of statesmen and political figures. So, this program really is in touch with the vibe and the pace of New York City. And if you were fortunate enough to work with ... That was Professor Clark, right? On the book project. What an extraordinary experience to make a temporary work with her.
Samuel Morse:
If we don't have further questions, please join me in thanking Brooke. I think what you do is just truly inspirational and amazing.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Oh, thank you, Sam. Thank you, Sam.
Samuel Morse:
If you haven't been, go and visit. It's just a wonderful thing to see, any of the exhibitions. But thank you so very much.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport:
Thank you. Thanks, everyone.