Displaying items by tag: Brandeis University

Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced that Baltimore businessman, author, and collector Stephen M. Salny has made a promised gift to the museum of 48 works on paper created by some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including 11 lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Among the other artists represented in the gift are Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden, Robert Motherwell, and Sean Scully.

Salny’s gift will augment strengths of the Rose Art Museum collection, which includes paintings and other works by some of the artists included, notably Kelly, Johns, Motherwell, and Frankenthaler, while also extending its holdings in new directions, including the first work by Hirst to by acquired by the museum.

Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum has opened an offsite gallery in an empty commercial space in downtown Waltham, Massachusetts, the Boston suburb that the Rose calls home.

Named Rosebud, the gallery will showcase video work from the museum’s collection and, according to a news release, aims to “activate public engagement with contemporary art through curated exhibitions and programs that revive underutilized properties in the city of Waltham.”

In May 1957, Life magazine published a photo spread headlined “Women Artists in Ascendance.” The Life article is the opening gambit in “Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler,” a revisionist examination of painting from the 1950s to the present day, opening at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University on Feb. 11.

The story led with a full-page photo of Frankenthaler. In it, she’s seated — either on a painting, or on a drop cloth; it’s a sea of blue — in a neat pink blouse and a white skirt, her legs neatly tucked beneath her. She’s young and attractive. But there’s something defiant, something fed up, about her gaze.

Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced two major grants, both for $100,000, from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Warhol Foundation grant will support the exhibition “Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood,” opening in September 2015. The Mellon Foundation grant will support three years of programming triggered by the hiring of a Curator of Academic Projects, an innovative position specifically designed to integrate the Rose’s collections and programs into teaching and learning at the university, according to Brandeis.

This is the first time that the Rose Art Museum has received a grant from either foundation.

The artist Chris Burden has never shied away from the shocking or obsessive, whether being nailed to a Volkswagen or crafting miniature landscapes with thousands of plastic figures.

But his latest work, a $2 million installation for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, merely requires the flick of a switch to come to life.

“Light of Reason” features 24 Victorian-era lampposts lined up in three rows. Concrete benches will be poured around their bases. The piece is so inoffensive that some might wonder whether it is art at all. Rose director Chris Bedford calls “Light of Reason” a “social sculpture.”

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has named 15 new members to its board of advisors and reappointed eight former board members. The unprecedented number of appointments, which follow the recruitment of Christopher Bedford as the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose in 2012 and the naming of Lizbeth Krupp as chair of the board of advisors last fall, are another important step in a new era in the museum’s history.

The Rose’s volunteer board includes prominent personalities in the contemporary art, academic, philanthropic, cultural and business communities in the Boston area and across the U.S. The new board members are Gannit Ankori, Leslie Aronzon, Mark Bradford, Ronni J. Casty, Rena M. Conti, Tory Fair, John S. Foster, Steven A.N. Goldstein, Susan B. Kaplan, Lizbeth Krupp, Frederick Lawrence, Beth Marcus, Dianne Markman, Tim Phillips, and Lisa Yuskavage.  Reappointed board members are Gerald Fineberg, Lois Foster, Matthew Kozol, Jonathan Novak, Betsy Pfau, Meryl Rose, Ann Tanenbaum, and George Wachter.

The sad saga of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, whose collection university trustees had voted to sell in 2009, ended today when the university announced the settlement of a lawsuit filed by museum supporters and the promise to keep the museum open without putting any of its art up for sale.

“The Rose remains open, and it has an important role to play in the life of Brandeis,” Fred Lawrence, the university’s president, told The Art Newspaper. “There are no plans to sell art.” Further, he added, the lawsuit, brought by four Rose board members and donors to prohibit any sales in Suffolk Probate and Family Court in Boston, was terminated, and the Massachusetts Attorney General has closed the case.

Lawrence declined to rule out another option that has been considered, however, that the Rose might raise money by “renting out” part of its collection. “We’re exploring options, but I’m focused on the 50th anniversary of the Rose this year, with planning traveling exhibitions, and with bringing supporters back to the museum,” he said.

The Rose was threatened with closure in January 2009, when Brandeis’s board of trustees voted to help alleviate the university’s deep financial troubles by selling art from the Rose’s collection, whose 7,000-plus works include seminal pieces by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra, among others. It has been valued at more than $350 million. Making matters worse, the board’s decision was sprung without warning on Michael Rush, then the Rose's director, and the museum’s board — who fought the move publicly and vociferously. Within months, Rush’s contract was not renewed and he has not been replaced.