Madison Square Park Conservancy announces Adam D. Glick as new curator
Adam D. Glick, Madison Square Park’s new curator
5:40 pm Jul. 9, 20121
In March, the Madison Square Park Conservancy created a $2 million endowment for its eight-year-old Mad. Sq. Art program. The endowment came with a permanent arts curator position named after Martin Friedman, the legendary former director of the Walker Arts Center and a longtime member of the Conservancy’s advisory board.
Today, the program announced that Adam D. Glick, who since October has served as the park’s associate curator, will take over the Martin Friedman Curatorship. In doing so, he becomes only the second head arts curator of a New York City park. (The first was Cecilia Alemani, curator of the High Line Park in the Meatpacking District.)
Glick, 27, was recruited last year by Conservancy president Debbie Landau from the New Museum, where he worked as an executive assistant to that museum’s president Lisa Phillips. In a telephone interview, Landau said one prerequisite of the job was that the curator be young.
“It’s really nice to have generational diversity,” she said, adding that Glick’s appointment would allow him to be mentored by older members of the advisory committee, like Friedman and board chair David Berliner.
“Part of Martin’s legacy is that he’s mentored and given us so many prominent curators and scholars over his fifty-year career, from Adam Weinberg [President of the Whitney Museum of American Art] to John Hanhardt,” the senior curator for media arts at the Smithsonian.
Glick graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied music and art history. He went on to receive a masters degree in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and has held various positions at MoMA and the International Fine Print Dealers Association.
In his new role, Glick said he’s looking forward to working with artists who have yet to exhibit their work out of doors.
“My eyes are always peeled for young or established artists in museums and galleries,” he said. “But one of my ambitions is to find artists who haven’t shown outside the gallery walls, and want to.”
Since 2004, the Mad. Sq. Art program has presented 24 outdoor exhibitions, featuring work by Mark di Suvero, Sol LeWitt, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Charles Long, whose globular, trippy network of colored railings, entitled Pet Sounds (pictured at left, courtesy James Ewing Photography), will be on view daily through September 9. On October 25, the American artist Leo Villareal will exhibit Buckyball, a large-scale set of nested geodesic domes made from LED tubes and inspired by the architect Buckminster Fuller.
Asked whether Glick is considering any artistic collaborations with Shake Shack, the permanently crowded burger stand on the park’s south side, he demurred.
“I can only say that I eat there much too often,” he said, “and that they have expanded my waistline.”
the current exhibit, Pet Sounds, at MSP is positively dreadful. not only is it an eyesore creatively and built in such a way that it is largely inaccessible to wheelchair users such as myself, but many of the "sounds" that are supposed to emanate from its structures don't work or are so benign that you can barely hear them. in addition to this latest, the two previous exhibits - sculptures by Alison Saar (who I am normally a fan of) and animation screens by Jacco Olivier were so bland that they generated very little interest from park goers.
hopefully Mr. Glick will take note that the most successful offerings of the past few years were the insanely provocative Gormley sculptures positioned not only in the park, but on top of buildings directly around it and the stunning Plaume piece, "Echo" which was placed right on the great lawn much to the delight of young and old. some of us even thought the Plaume piece provided such a true sense of what the park is about, the Zen-like head should have been purchased and made a permanent fixture!
of course not all public art needs to hit you over the head, but it's nice to come away with feeling like you've just seen something special that you can recommend to friends and visitors as a "must see".