Brooke Kamin Rapaport is a curator and writer. She was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome in winter 2025 where she advanced research and writing on a major new volume on twenty-first century public art and democracy. Her work centers art and artists through art historical, cultural, historical, political, and social contexts.
She was Artistic Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York (2013 to 2024). She was responsible for artist selection, artistic vision, community and public engagement, exhibition travel, fundraising, and public programs for new commissions by artists including 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. An illustrated, scholarly catalogue accompanied every project.
Rapaport was the editor and lead essayist for Public Art in Public Space: Twenty Years Advancing Work in New York’s Madison Square Park, published by Gregory R. Miller & Company (2024) on the twentieth anniversary of the Conservancy’s public art program. She launched an annual public art symposium featuring many of the most dynamic voices in the field to consider urgent issues in art and society. In 2017, she founded Public Art Consortium, a national convening of museum, public art, and sculpture park curators.
She was the Commissioner and Curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale of the critically acclaimed exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty / Libertá. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects were exhibition designers. A volume published by Gregory R. Miller & Company with essays by Rapaport, Darby English, Tobi Haslett, and Anne M. Wagner accompanied the show.
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, Madison, and San Francisco. 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 retrospective 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 by Amazon.com (2007). The volume also won the New York State Historical Association’s Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts (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 (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 living 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 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). Her article examining a prominent street mural in Rome addressing femicide ran in The Art Newspaper on International Women’s Day (2025).
In addition to her work as a juror and an interlocutor on topics in contemporary art, Rapaport has lectured and moderated panel discussions and is a regular speaker at art fairs, conferences, galleries, museums, and for radio and broadcast.
Rapaport sits on the boards of three artist-endowed foundations: the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (Vice President), the Al Held Foundation (President), and the vonRydingsvard and Greengard Foundation. She currently advises the Nevelson Legacy Council and the Public Art Working Group at Amherst College. She served on the Curatorial Committee for the Barbican (London) Podium (2024). Rapaport is a former chair of the Board of Trustees the Mead Art Museum (2008 – 2012) and was a board member of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City.
She is a member of American Alliance of Museums, ArtTable, Association of Art Museum Curators, and College Art Association. A cum laude graduate of Amherst, 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 doctorate from Amherst (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