New York | Cristina Iglesias’ ‘Landscape and Memory’ Tour & Reception at Madison Square Park

Please join us for an in-person tour of Cristina Iglesias’ Landscape and Memory, on view at Madison Square Park in New York City. The tour will be led by ArtTable Member Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy. Drinks will also be served.

Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias invites the public to consider the forgotten terrains and geographic history of New York City in a new public art installation opening this June, her first major temporary public art project in the United States. Landscape and Memory places five bronze sculptural pools, flowing with water, into Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn, harkening back to when the Cedar Creek coursed across the land where the park stands today. Building on Iglesias’ practice of unearthing the forgotten and excavating natural history, Landscape and Memory resurfaces in the imaginations of contemporary viewers the now-invisible force of this ancient waterway. More information about the exhibition can be found below.

Landscape and Memory is organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator; Tom Reidy, Deputy Director of Finance and Special Projects; and Truth Murray-Cole, Curatorial Manager. Keats Myer is the Conservancy’s Executive Director.

This program is open to ArtTable Members only for $15. Capacity is limited.

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About Brooke Kamin Rapaport

Since joining the Conservancy in 2013, Brooke Kamin Rapaport has curated and overseen its program of commissioned public-sculpture exhibitions, which has included such artists as Diana Al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Leonardo Drew, Teresita Fernandez, Josiah McElheny, Ivan Navarro, Giuseppe Penone, Martin Puryear, and Arlene Shechet. Through the Conservancy, she established Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public-art-program, and sculpture park colleagues. In 2019, she served as Commissioner and Curator of the United States Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, with a representation of artist Martin Puryear.

Rapaport has worked as a museum curator, independent curator, and art writer. During her 13-year tenure at the Brooklyn Museum, she organized numerous exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogues in her roles as assistant and then associate curator of contemporary art. As part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Grand Lobby series of installations, she worked with contemporary artists to realize their projects. As guest curator at The Jewish Museum, New York, she organized Houdini: Art and Magic (2010), an interdisciplinary exhibition on the life and enduring significance to contemporary artists of the magician and escape artist Harry Houdini, and the retrospective exhibition Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (2007). Rapaport has also held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, New York. She is a contributing editor and frequent writer for Sculpture magazine and a regular lecturer, moderator, panelist, and catalogue essayist on contemporary art and public art.

Rapaport received her B.A. cum laude in art history from Amherst College and completed her M.A. in art history from Rutgers University. She is also the recipient of a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Museum Studies from the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She sits on the Board of Directors of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Al Held Foundation, von Rydingsvard and Greengard Foundation and is Vice President of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in New York. She currently serves on the board of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

About the Artist

Cristina Iglesias shapes large-scale, site-specific sculpture and installations that probe the tension between past and present, ancient and contemporary. Resisting the asceticism of the Minimalist movement, Iglesias initially created grid-like structures in natural materials that were suspended to assemble pavilions and architectural spaces. Beginning in the 2000s, Iglesias began to incorporate water into her permanent outdoor projects and sculptures.

Iglesias’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at museums internationally, including Centro Botín, Santander, Spain (2018); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2013); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2006); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2003); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997). She additionally has been commissioned to create major projects and installations at Bloomberg headquarters, London (2017); Fondaciòn Botin, Santander (2017); Tres Aguas at Toledo, Spain (2014); Mexican Foundation of Environmental Education, Baja, California (2010); Museo del Prado, Madrid (2007); and Royal Museum of Fine Art, Antwerp (2006). The Museum of Fine Arts Houston opened Iglesias’ major permanent outdoor commission, Inner Landscape (the lithosphere, the roots, the water) (2020) in front of the new Kinder Building. Last summer she realized Hondalea (2021), transforming a lighthouse into a sculpture on Santa Clara Island in the Bay of Donostia, San Sebastián, Spain.

Iglesias represented Spain at the Venice Biennale (1986, 1993) and at the Biennale of Sydney (1990, 2012); at the Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1995); the Taipei Biennial (2003); at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2006); and at the Folkstone Triennal (2011).

Iglesias was born in San Sebastián, Northern Spain in November 1956. She studied Chemical Sciences in the University of the Basque Country (1976 – 1978), and ceramics and sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art in London (1980 – 1982). She was granted a Fulbright scholarship to study at Pratt Institute (1988) and was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (1995).

Her studio is in Madrid, Spain.

About the Exhibition (Continued)

For Landscape and Memory, Iglesias digs deep into the park’s lawns to install five subterranean bronze sculptures carved with intricately patterned bas-reliefs. A subtle stream of water continuously trails across the sculptures’ hollowed surfaces. This evokes the constancy of water slowly eroding rocky surfaces across millennia. The installation conjures the existence of unseen ancient streams that continue to run beneath modern cities, connecting the urban present with its primordial past. It connects us to abstract ideas of what lies beneath.

Nodding to historian Simon Schama’s major 1995 volume of the same name, which surveyed the history of landscape across time and terrain, Landscape and Memory is informed by Iglesias’ research into the history of the site. For the project, Iglesias located and studied historic maps that document the water flow through Madison Square Park, where the Cedar Creek once coursed. With nineteenth-century industrialization, streams like the Cedar were buried underground to create additional land for building sites, underground drains, or sewers. Through Landscape and Memory, Iglesias renders this history visible again, inviting viewers to contemplate centuries of transformation of urban sites that were once natural.

About Madison Square Park Conservancy

Madison Square Park Conservancy cultivates and enlivens Madison Square Park, a dynamic seven-acre public park in New York City’s Flatiron District and one of the city’s most treasured green spaces. Through its public art commissions, horticultural stewardship, and engaging programming, the nonprofit creates an urban oasis that welcomes a diverse community of over 60,000 visitors each day. Keats Myer is the Conservancy’s Executive Director.

Since 2004, the Conservancy has become a leader in commissioning new works of public art, curating and presenting over 40 major site-specific installations and solo exhibitions through its art programming. Led by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator, the program invites leading artists to push the boundaries of their practice and create risk-taking new works that experiment with materiality, scale, and theme in response to the park’s unique environment. The ambition of the commissioning program expands each year alongside the diverse range of innovative artists including Diana Al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Leonardo Drew, Maya Lin, Iván Navarro, Martin Puryear, Arlene Shechet, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

In 2019, the Conservancy served as the commissioning institution for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, marking the first time that an organization whose visual art program focuses exclusively on public art has received this honor. With Rapaport serving as Commissioner, the Conservancy presented new work by Martin Puryear.

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Image: Cristina Iglesias overseeing the installation of Landscape and Memory, courtesy of Madison Square Park Conservancy