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January 31, 2009 at 12:51 PM in Art World, Ephemera, Found-Art, Vernacular | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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January 31, 2009 at 12:50 PM in Art World, Ephemera, Found-Art, Vernacular | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Read all about it and then sign the petition; you can also join the Facebook group "Save the Rose Museum".
Visit The Rose Art Museum online. Here is their Mission Statement:
via C-Monster:
Out in the cold: The Rose Art Museum, at Brandeis. (Photo by kenudigit.)
As you may have heard, Brandeis University wants to shut down the Rose Art Museum, with plans to liquidate it’s 6,000-piece collection to help the university stay afloat financially. And, as you may have heard, a whole lotta people are not very happy about it, including a number of the university’s alumnae — one of whom, Eric Gordon, is a graduate of the class of ‘76, and currently serves as the head of paintings conservation at the The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. He has kindly agreed to let us publish a letter he sent to the university’s president this afternoon regarding the situation: [read letter here]
via CultureGrrl:
NY Times Reports That Massachusetts AG Will Review Brandeis Art-Sale Plans UPDATED
Sometimes, it seems, we can't trust what Brandeis University's publicity machine would have us believe. As I reported here, a university spokesman told the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers
that the Massachusetts Attorney General had been informed of
university's plan to sell the Rose Museum's entire collection. The
university spokesman declared that the AG (in Edgers words) "will not
block" the disposals. It now appears this may have been mere wishful
thinking on the university's part.
And the statement
released yesterday by Brandeis' press office, which was specifically an
announcement of the plan to close the Rose and sell the art, made it
sound as if the faculty had approved this: [read on]
via Modern Art Notes:
Q&A with Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush - Jan 28
By almost any standard, the Rose Art Museum is a model university art museum. It has a fine collection. It exhibits it regularly and creatively. It provides a place for the vanguard to emerge. Administratively, the museum draws about half of its operating budget from endowment funds -- a stunningly high percentage. So when I talked with Michael Rush, the Rose's director this morning, he was eager to point out that what's happening at the Rose has nothing to do with the Rose and everything to do with Brandeis. [read on]
“I was shocked. I’m still shocked,” Michael Rush, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, said about the decision to close the museum. Photo: Erik Jacobs for The New York Times
via NYTimes:
via Artnet News:
The reaction so far is anger, to say the least. The head of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries announced that the sell-off "puts all of our roles at our institutions in jeopardy," referring to college gallery directors who depend on the largesse and good will of private donors. The Rose has been built primarily through gifts. As recently as March 2008, it was touting donations from illustrious patrons valued at $2 million, including works by Marcel Dzama, Mike Kelley, Robert Motherwell, Vic Muniz, James Rosenquist, Joel Shapiro and Jessica Stockholder.
On campus, meanwhile, an editorial in the Justice, a student paper, compared the decision to "a junkie pawning his wedding ring," and called for students to "fight back." A student sit-in is already planned at the Rose for Thursday at 1 p.m. Such turmoil is likely to make any auction house nervous about taking on the sale. Public outcry caused a headache for Christie’s when Virginia’s Randolph College decided to use the New York auctioneer to deaccession some major works from the Maier Museum; in that scandal, too, the university employed heavy-handed tactics to avoid consulting with faculty, students and museum staff. Those sales were modest compared to the wholesale liquidation proposed by Brandeis.
Founded in 1961, the Rose is the source of considerable pride on campus. It contains notable contemporary works by Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Morris Louis, among others. Among the pieces that might be particularly coveted by the art market, according to those familiar with the collection, are Robert Raushenberg’s Second Time Painting, and Andy Warhol’s early-career Saturday Night Disaster. Brandeis said that it plans to replace the museum with a "fine arts teaching center with studio space and an exhibition gallery." University reps said that an unnamed "major art dealer" would oversee the fire sale from the school’s end.
Brandeis has said that it faces an annual budget shortfall of $10
million, and has already proposed slashing staff and increasing
enrollment (great combination, that!), as well as other exotic
endeavors like moving from individual majors to a system of
"meta-majors." More important, perhaps, is the role that the Bernard Madoff swindle may be playing in Brandeis’ radical move. The single largest patrons to the university were Carl and Ruth Shapiro, key figures in the Madoff scam, whose foundation has lost big [see Artnet News,
Dec. 16, 2008]. The Shapiros are notable museum supporters; one
unconfirmed report has the museum holding many works from the Shapiros
as "promised gifts."
One auction-house insider contacted by Artnet Magazine
noted that just one of the better works from the Rose collection might
fill the $10-million budget gap, adding, "There must be a bigger
picture there" -- a sentiment shared by many. While Brandeis has an
immediate funding short-fall, and is looking for gap-fillers to get it
through the recession, officials note that the process of selling the
art "could take up to about a couple of years, minimum." There is no
precedent for selling off a university collection of this size.
January 28, 2009 at 10:39 AM in Art of Advertising, Current Affairs, Futures, Museums, Protest, Public Art | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Christopher Lowry Johnson, Implosion (6), 2008, oil on linen, 16 x 22".
This exhibition, curated by artist Joy Garnett, culls its title from a poem by W. B. Yeats. The show responds to a variety of political issues, including Hurricane Katrina, which is loosely referenced in a series of unframed drawings, prints, and photographs by Paul Chan and the New Orleans–based artist collective the Front. Most striking from this group are the architecturally inflected images, such as Jonathan Traviesa’s Sculptural Awareness #7, 2005, a photograph of a house covered with peeling strips of canvas, and Megan Roniger’s precise pen-and-ink drawing of vine-covered houses precariously resting on tilted poles.
Recovering such lost histories rather than “brushing them under the rug” is taken literally by Mounir Fatmi, who affixes the flags of G8 nations to large brooms that lean against the gallery’s central pillar. Whereas Fatmi’s installation is playfully literal, Stephen Andrews’s drawings are abstracted beyond recognition. Carlos Motta’s broadsheet listing US interventions in Latin America communicates an explicitly anti-US agenda, while Yevgeniy Fiks’s black-and-white painting of a film still, Songs of Russia #20, 2007, based on the titular 1944 movie, poignantly reminds viewers of the short-lived government and Hollywood support for the former Soviet Union.
Rather than stake out a political position, Croatian artist Renata Poljak focuses on personal responses to the Serbian war in two videos accompanied by a subtle, droning sound installation. One depicts a Croatian woman who feels trapped in bourgeois exile, while the other presents a drive through an uninhabited, sunlit Croatian landscape, narrated by, alternately, a Croatian woman and her Austrian companion. While the overall politics of the exhibition are diffuse, the individual pieces unearth the creative possibility embedded in official history.
January 26, 2009 at 10:38 AM in Art of Advertising, Exhibitions | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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January 26, 2009 at 10:22 AM in Art of Advertising, Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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