"... the labor of my body keeps me alive and awake." Perspective on Ursula von Rydingsvard's Sculpture: Panel discussion with Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Eric Booker, Susan Unterberg, and Kennedy Yanko

Brooke Kamin Rapaport is a curator and writer. 

In winter 2025, she was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome where she advanced research on a book on 21st century public art and democracy.

Rapaport was Artistic Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York from 2013 to 2024. In 2017, she founded Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public art and sculpture park curators.

She was the Commissioner and Curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with the exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty / Libertá.

She was guest curator at The Jewish Museum in New York for The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (2007) and Houdini: Art and Magic (2010). Rapaport was the assistant curator and associate curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum where she organized numerous exhibitions and wrote corresponding catalogues.

She sits on the boards of three artist-endowed foundations: the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (Vice President), the Al Held Foundation (Chair), and the vonRydingsvard and Greengard Foundation. She received an honorary degree, Doctor of Arts, from Amherst College in 2022.

Eric Booker is Associate Curator at Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre outdoor museum located in New York’s Hudson Valley. Committed to working alongside artists of diverse backgrounds and with underrecognized histories, he has cultivated ambitious projects with artists including Kevin Beasley, Beatriz Cortez, Dionne Lee, and Arlene Shechet. He previously held the position of Assistant Curator and Exhibition Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he edited Smokehouse Associates, an in-depth study of the Smokehouse public art collective which The New York Times named one of the “Best Art Books of 2022.” His research and essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including catalogs on Dionne Lee, Arlene Shechet, Ricardo Cabret, and Just Above Midtown Gallery.

Kennedy Yanko creates sublime sculptures and installations using paint skins and found metal. Rooted in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, her work pushes the boundaries between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, the surreal and earthbound.

Central to her practice are paint skins—formed by pouring gallons of paint onto flat surfaces and lifting them once nearly dry. Yanko positions them within meticulously crafted metal armatures. This process requires both power and innovation to twist and mold the skins into their dynamic salvaged supports.

Deeply influenced by Daoism and theosophic ideologies, for Yanko, the cyclic repurposing of materials alludes to the infinite possibilities for their reinterpretation. In the process of making, she becomes a conduit for renewal and regeneration.

Born in St. Louis in 1988, Yanko has been included in significant exhibitions at the Albertina Museum  (2024); Brooklyn Museum (2022; 2024); CF Hill (2022); Parrish Art Museum (2022); Rubell Museum (2021), where she was the 2021-2022 Artist in Residence and first sculptor to hold the residency; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019). Her work is held in numerous pubic and private collections across the U.S., Europe, and South America.