Madison Square Park's Conservancy Names New Chief Curator
Currently the chief curator at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., Markonish will begin her new job stewarding the art program for the 6.2-acre park, which is used by 60,000 people daily, in June. She succeeds Brooke Kamin Rapaport, who helped raise the park's profile as a platform for ambitious commissions of public art. Rapaport's departure was announced last October.
As a leader of Mass MoCA's curatorial program since 2007, Markonish has worked with artists including Nick Cave, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Kaino, Teresita Fernandez and Jeffrey Gibson on commissions often the size of a football field. That experience immediately put her name at the top of a list of applicants, Holly Leicht, the conservancy's executive director, said in an interview.
'Denise is someone who brings the combination of academic rigor, an ethos of collaboration and a strong sense of fun,' Leicht added. Markonish had previously partnered with the conservancy to find a long-term site for Martin Puryear's 40-foot sculpture 'Big Bling,' which debuted at Madison Square Park in 2016 and traveled to Philadelphia. It has presided over a new park space created for the piece in downtown North Adams since 2019.
'I've built my career on doing large-scale commissions,' Markonish said in an interview. 'And to do so now in such a public place and thinking outside the box of the walls of a museum will be an amazing challenge.'
Born in Boston, Markonish, who is 49, has degrees from Brandeis University, where she studied art history and interned at the Rose Art Museum, and from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. After graduating in 1999, she worked at the Fuller Museum of Art (now the Fuller Craft Museum) in Brockton, Mass., for three years. There, she did her first big artist commission, with Mark Dion, in 2001.
'That was a game changer for me in thinking about working deeply with an artist one-on-one and starting from zero,' said Markonish, who also worked at Artspace in New Haven, Conn., for five years before coming to Mass MoCA.
Markonish collaborated with Nick Cave, the artist best-known for his wearable sculptures called Soundsuits, on his immersive landscape 'Until.' The work, made up of thousands of found objects and millions of beads, debuted in 2016 at Mass MoCA and traveled to Arkansas, Australia and Scotland.
Cave remembers Markonish coming to his studio to offer the project. 'She goes, 'Only one stipulation — no Soundsuits',' he recalled in an interview, adding that he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Considering Markonish's move to Madison Square Park, he said: 'I think she will assess and work with artists that are up for the challenge of public space and really hungry for that kind of moment.'
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