Brandeis Magazine

By Emily Gold Boutilier

Denise Markonish ’97
Photo Credit: Rashmi Gill

Madison Square Park — a three-block patch of green near New York City’s Flatiron Building — has two big claims to fame.

The first: The fact that Shake Shack originated there as a hot dog cart.

The second: Its public art program.

Over the past two decades, the Madison Square Park Conservancy has commissioned close to 50 outdoor works by artists as acclaimed as Maya Lin, whose “Ghost Forest” had a seven-month run in the space, and Martin Puryear, whose 40-foot-tall sculpture “Big Bling” premiered there in 2016, and who went on to represent the U.S. at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

In late June, Denise Markonish ’97 becomes the park’s chief curator. She arrives from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art — popularly known as MASS MoCA — where she’s spent 18 years producing large-scale commissions by big-name artists.

Markonish’s decision to leave MASS MoCA came down to access and reach. The museum gets more than 100,000 visitors every year, an impressive total. Madison Square Park attracts that number every two days. In fact, the only two art museums in the United States with an annual attendance that exceeds Madison Square Park’s are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.

Access and reach are especially vital in the art world today, Markonish believes. “Making art is a political act,” she says. “Whether the work is overtly political or not, artists interrogate what’s happening in the world. The fact that Madison Square Park is a public place means a variety of people see the work exhibited there. At a time when democracy is continually under attack, bringing art into a publicly available space feels important.”

Markonish is part of a long line of accomplished curators who got their start at the Rose Art Museum, where she interned for more than three years as a Brandeis student. She credits the late Carl Belz, longtime director of the Rose, and Pamela Allara, now an associate professor emerita of contemporary art, for her success as a curator. “Both of them taught me to care about artists first,” she says.

For Markonish, this mindset meant traveling to Northern Ireland with artist Glenn Kaino (whom she first met at the Rose) to do research for what became “In the Light of a Shadow.” Spanning a gallery the size of a football field, this 2021 MASS MoCA installation combined sculpture, sound and moving shadows to evoke the civil rights movements in the U.S. and Northern Ireland.

In May, Markonish installed her final show as MASS MoCA’s first chief curator. It’s a survey of 150 works by the painter Vincent Valdez titled “Just a Dream …,” co-organized with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

When Markonish takes over at Madison Square Park, she says she’s eager to continue to “help artists dream” — artists who, like she does, want to get to know the people who use the park every day.

Markonish loves that Madison Square Park is a neighborhood hangout as much as a place to encounter art. “I remember walking through the park this winter,” she says. “I hadn’t gotten the job yet. It was bitterly cold — so windy, in fact, that as I was walking down the street, the wind blew my tote bag right off my arm.

“But when I got to the park, people were in it” — bundled up, walking their dogs, playing chess. “And that, to me, said so much.”

Emily Gold Boutilier is a freelance writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts.