The Madison Sq. Park Conservancy in New York has chosen Denise Markonish as its subsequent chief curator, the group introduced Thursday.
Presently the chief curator at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., Markonish will start her new job stewarding the artwork program for the 6.2-acre park, which is utilized by 60,000 individuals each day, in June. She succeeds Brooke Kamin Rapaport, who helped increase the park’s profile as a platform for formidable commissions of public artwork. Rapaport’s departure was introduced final October.
As a frontrunner of Mass MoCA’s curatorial program since 2007, Markonish has labored with artists together with Nick Cave, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Kaino, Teresita Fernandez and Jeffrey Gibson on commissions usually the scale of a soccer discipline. That have instantly put her identify on the high of an inventory of candidates, Holly Leicht, the conservancy’s government director, mentioned in an interview.
“Denise is somebody who brings the mix of educational rigor, an ethos of collaboration and a robust sense of enjoyable,” Leicht added. Markonish had beforehand partnered with the conservancy to discover a long-term website for Martin Puryear’s 40-foot sculpture “Big Bling,” which debuted at Madison Sq. Park in 2016 and traveled to Philadelphia. It has presided over a brand new park house created for the piece in downtown North Adams since 2019.
“I’ve constructed my profession on doing large-scale commissions,” Markonish mentioned in an interview. “And to take action now in such a public place and considering exterior the field of the partitions of a museum can be an incredible problem.”
Born in Boston, Markonish, who’s 49, has levels from Brandeis College, the place she studied artwork historical past and interned on the Rose Art Museum, and from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. After graduating in 1999, she labored on the Fuller Museum of Artwork (now the Fuller Craft Museum) in Brockton, Mass., for 3 years. There, she did her first large artist fee, with Mark Dion, in 2001.
“That was a sport changer for me in serious about working deeply with an artist one-on-one and ranging from zero,” mentioned Markonish, who additionally labored at Artspace in New Haven, Conn., for 5 years earlier than coming to Mass MoCA.
Markonish collaborated with Nick Cave, the artist best-known for his wearable sculptures known as Soundsuits, on his immersive panorama “Till.” The work, made up of hundreds of discovered objects and thousands and thousands of beads, debuted in 2016 at Mass MoCA and traveled to Arkansas, Australia and Scotland.
Cave remembers Markonish coming to his studio to supply the challenge. “She goes, ‘Just one stipulation — no Soundsuits’,” he recalled in an interview, including that he had been ready for simply such a chance. Contemplating Markonish’s transfer to Madison Sq. Park, he mentioned: “I believe she’s going to assess and work with artists which are up for the problem of public house and actually hungry for that type of second.”
