About Quappi Projects
Founded by artist John Brooks in 2017, Quappi Projects was a Louisville-based contemporary art gallery featuring artists whose works reflected the zeitgeist.
Believing the highest function of art is to allow human beings to know ourselves more deeply, Quappi Projects exhibited challenging, provocative, diverse work as a way to explore and understand the mysteries of the human experience. The gallery closed in 2022.
Quappi Projects’ namesake is Mathilde “Quappi” Beckmann, the wife of the early 20th Century painter Max Beckmann, an artist who was branded “degenerate” by the Nazi regime, resulting in dismissal from his position at the Art School in Frankfurt, and the confiscation and destruction of his work. Eventually both Max and Quappi became refugees—
first in the Netherlands and ultimately in the United States. Quappi was very much a woman reflective of her time and Beckmann described her as “an angel sent to me so that I could accomplish my work.” Because the spirit of our age requires strength, courage, action, and discipline, it is respectfully in the memory of Quappi’s spirit that we endeavor to do what we do.
Gallerist & Curator
A native of central, Kentucky, John studied Political Science and English literature at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, with continuing studies in art at Central St. Martins and the Hampstead School of Art in London, England. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe and is held in private collections in numerous countries, including the collections of Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown and Larry Shapin and Ladonna Nicolas. In late 2013, he returned to Louisville, KY after several years in Chicago, Illinois and London, England.