Brooke Kamin Rapaport is a curator and writer. In winter 2025, she will be a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome.
She was Artistic Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York from 2013 to 2024. Rapaport was responsible for the outdoor, public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists including projects by Diana Al-Hadid, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Tony Cragg, Leonardo Drew, Nicole Eisenman, Teresita Fernandéz, Hugh Hayden, Ana María Hernando, Cristina Iglesias, Maya Lin, Josiah McElheny, Iván Navarro, Giuseppe Penone, Sheila Pepe, Martin Puryear, Erwin Redl, Arlene Shechet, Shahzia Sikander, Rose B. Simpson, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Rapaport was the editor and lead essayist in Public Art in Public Space: Twenty Years Advancing Work in New York’s Madison Square Park, published by Gregory R. Miller & Company in 2024 on the twentieth anniversary of the Conservancy’s public art program. She founded Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public art and sculpture park curators launched in 2017. In 2015, through Madison Square Park Conservancy, Rapaport inaugurated an annual symposium on public art featuring artists, curators, scholars, journalists, and cultural leaders.
As guest curator at The Jewish Museum in New York, she organized Houdini: Art and Magic, an interdisciplinary exhibition on the life and enduring significance in visual culture and contemporary art of the magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (2010). The show traveled to venues in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin. Yale University Press published the exhibition catalogue. Rapaport was guest curator at The Jewish Museum for The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, 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 voted the best Art and Photography book of 2007 by Amazon.com. The volume also won the New York State Historical Association’s Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts in 2009.
Rapaport was the assistant curator (1989 to 1993) and associate curator (1993 to 2002) of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum where she organized numerous exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogues for Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960 (Abrams, 2001 with Kevin L. Stayton); Twentieth Century American Sculpture at the White House: Inspired by Rodin (1998, installed in the First Ladies’ Garden, with colleagues); and the retrospective Leon Polk Smith: American Painter (1995). She brought Leon Golub’s career survey to the Brooklyn Museum following its debut at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2001. Rapaport acquired and catalogued objects and planned exhibitions focusing on the Museum’s permanent collection. As part of the Grand Lobby series of installations by contemporary artists, she worked with Meg Webster, Houston Conwill, Donald Lipski, and Komar and Melamid to realize their projects (1990-1995).
She is a contributing editor and frequent writer for Sculpture magazine. Her essay “Jaume Plensa and the Refresh on Beauty” was published in the artist’s monograph (Skira Rizzoli, 2018). 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 (Thames & Hudson/Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2010). She participated in a published roundtable discussion for Public Art Dialogue (2024).
In addition to her work as a juror and moderator on issues surrounding contemporary art and public art, Rapaport has lectured and moderated panel discussions and is a regular speaker on contemporary art and public art for radio, video, conferences, and art fairs.
She sits on the Curatorial Committee for the Barbican (London) Podium and the boards of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (Vice President), the Al Held Foundation (Vice President), and the vonRydingsvard and Greengard Foundation. Rapaport is a former chair of the Board of Trustees the Mead Art Museum (2008 – 2012) and was a board member of of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City.
A cum laude graduate of Amherst College, Rapaport received a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Museum Studies from the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her Master of Arts degree in art history is from Rutgers University. She received an honorary degree, Doctor of Arts, from Amherst College in 2022.
Installation view. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend. The Jewish Museum, New York.
Installation view. Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960, Brooklyn Museum.
Annual symposium on public art, Madison Square Park Conseravncy, New York
Martin Puryear: Liberty / Libertá, U.S. Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale