In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Madison Square Park Conservancy, a public/private partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, has lined up a slate of projects by major contemporary artists and will extend its programming to two additional Manhattan parks.
The conservancy has lined up commissions by four women artists to mark its anniversary—sculptural projects by Nicole Eisenman and Rose B. Simpson, an installation by Ana María Hernando and a performance piece by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Simpson’s and Campos-Pons’ projects will expand beyond Madison Square Park into Inwood Hill Park and Harlem Art Park, respectively, marking the conservancy’s first-ever collaboration with other public parks around the city.
The anniversary year will also be marked by the conservancy’s first retrospective publication, an academic record of the last two decades of public art in the park, along with a short documentary outlining the programme’s history. Alumni artists will also be showcased through audio interviews and a corresponding public arts symposium.
“The anniversary is an opportunity for the conservancy's public art programme to assess the past two decades and also look ahead to the next”, says Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the conservancy's artistic director and chief curator. “One of our goals is to have works of art experienced and seen in even more communities and to push out the programme in new ways, such as collaborations with other public parks in New York City."
Nicole Eisenman’s commissioned work, Stopped Crane, (24 October 2024-9 March 2025) will offer viewers the opportunity to explore a toppled 100-foot-long industrial crane, complete with sculptural “barnacles” as embellishments. Rose B. Simpson’s Seed, (11 April-22 September 2024), a multi-park presentation of androgynous sentinel figures in steel and bronze, draws upon Indigenous land contestation and personal experience. To Let the Sky Know/Dejar que el cielo sepa by Ana María Hernando (16 January-17 March 2024) centres the textural environment of sumptuous fabric netting in a nod to clouds and waterfalls. María Magdalena Campos-Pons's Procession of Angels (September 2024) will consist of a seven-mile processional performance that ends with a poetry reading and musical celebration in Madison Square Park.
Anna Maria Hernando, Seidel City, 2023 Madison Square Park Conservancy
”Madison Square Park is a uniquely accessible venue for seeing work, new work, by living artists,” Rapaport says. “Our art programme demonstrates the significance that art can play in an urban public space and the impacts that it can have on people's lives”.
The publication debuting alongside the next season of commissions, Public Art in Public Space, features essays from Brooke Kamin Rapaport as well as the artist Joe Baker, co-founder of The Lenape Center, the scholars Arlene Dávila, Nancy Princenthal and John Hanhardt, and curators Lowery Stokes Sims and Herb Hoi Chun Tam.
“It was important for us to convene critical writing on what public art is, publicness and what it means for an artist to bring their work out into public space, how this is a way for an artist to stretch their practice, to bring new eyes and minds to their work,” says Rapaport. “It’s been incredibly gratifying to work on this book and that will come out in the spring.”
Since its inception in 2004, Madison Square Park Conservancy has commissioned around 50 projects by contemporary artists, including Diana Al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Maya Lin and Alison Saar. In 2019, it served as the commissioning institution for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, featuring work by Martin Puryear, the first time an organisation with a public art focus was involved in the biennale.