11 LUG 2019 · Gallery talk with Leonardo Drew, Savona Bailey-McClain, and Brooke Kamin Rapaport in conjunction with the artist's exhibitions on view at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York and at Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Savona Bailey-McClain is Executive Director/Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past twenty years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island, and Harlem. She is also host/producer of the weekly radio program “State of the Arts NYC.”
Brooke Kamin Rapaport is the Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy. She is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists. In addition to her work as a juror and moderator on issues surrounding contemporary art, Rapaport is a contributing editor and writer for Sculpture magazine, serves on the Board of Directors of Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, and as Vice President of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. She is also the curator and commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Drew spoke to The New York Times on the occasion of his new installation, City in the Grass, at Madison Square Park: “Brooke is daring, and that’s why she will ask artists to realize outdoor works when they’re not outdoor-work artists. It does take a leap of faith. She’s there before you’re there.”
Leonardo Drew is known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. He was born in 1961 in Tallahassee, Florida, and he grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.