Do We Still Need Monuments?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport is Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York. She is responsible for the Conservancy’s program of commissioned, public sculpture exhibitions by contemporary artists including Diana Al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Leonardo Drew, Teresita Fernández, Josiah McElheny, Ivan Navarro, Martin Puryear, Arlene Shechet and Krzysztof Wodiczko. In 2019, Rapaport served as Commissioner and Curator of the United States Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà. She was a curator in the contemporary art department at the Brooklyn Museum and has organized exhibitions at The Jewish Museum.

Lauren Haynes is Director of Artist Initiatives and Curator, Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas. Haynes led the curatorial team of State of the Art 2020, the second iteration of State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now (2014), which opened at both Crystal Bridges and the Momentary in February 2020. She was co-curator of the 2019 Crystal Bridges’ exhibition Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today and the 2018 Crystal Bridges’ exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art. Prior to joining Crystal Bridges in October 2016, Haynes spent nearly a decade at The Studio Museum in Harlem. As a specialist in African-American contemporary art, Haynes curated dozens of exhibitions at the Studio Museum and contemporary art institutions in New York. Haynes was a 2018 Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow. She is co-curator of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art taking place across Tennessee in 2022.

Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture, and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He was formerly Professor of Art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver where he was also Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art; Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York, and the l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A co-founder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, he is a prolific writer with numerous published articles, catalog essays, and juried papers. In 2000, he worked as co-editor of the Shanghai Biennale. In 2012, Ken founded Monument Lab with Paul Farber, independent public art and history studio based in Philadelphia that works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Monument Lab cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.

Helen Lee has had many roles in the art world, including collector, academic, art advisor, art book editor, and auction house specialist. She has worked at Christie’s, Harry N. Abrams Publishing, the Robert Miller Gallery, and for James Wolfensohn, among others. Her passion for the arts derives from her belief that art and culture provide vital means of communication across cultural and political divides. Helen is an advisor to the Milken Institute for its art and culture programming. She is the Chairman of the American Foundation for the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she completed her post-graduate studies after earning a BA from Harvard. Helen is also a board member of the Rail.

Joachim Pissarro is the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries, Hunter College, CUNY/City University of New York. He was a Curator at MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. His recent curatorial projects include Alberto Giacometti | Yves Klein: In Search of the Absolute at Gagosian Gallery London (2016); Pissarro à Eragny at the Musée du Luxembourg (2017); Olga Picasso, Musée National Picasso, Paris (2017), Museo Picasso, Málaga (2019), and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2019). His latest book Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (2018, Penn State University Press) is co-authored with David Carrier, following Wild Art (Phaidon, 2016). Joachim is also a Consulting Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.