Sharon Rosenberg:
Welcome, and good afternoon, good evening, good morning to the Brandeis alumni, parents and friends around the world who are joining us for this event. My name is Sharon Rosenberg. I'm senior director of alumni relations. I'm also a member of the Class of 2000, and I'm celebrating my 20th reunion this weekend. Thank you very much for attending this exciting event. Before I introduce our speaker, just want to share a few logistical notes. This event is being recorded. Closed captions are available through the live transcript icon at the bottom of your screen. There will be time for questions following Dr. Ankori's presentation. To ask a question, please type it into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. We look forward to getting to as many questions as possible.
Sharon Rosenberg:
And now, I'm delighted to introduce you to the Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum, Dr. Gannit Ankori, a critically acclaimed author, curator, and educator. Gannit was appointed the Henry and Lois Foster director and chief curator of the Rose Art Museum on January 1st of this year, after serving six months on an interim basis. She was a member of the museum's board of advisors and its collections committee, and curated three past exhibitions at the Rose before taking on her current leadership role. Gannit joined the Brandeis faculty in 2010, and is a professor of art history and theory and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In addition to leading the Rose, Gannit maintains an active role as a teacher and an international scholar and curator, allowing her to integrate the Rose into campus life, as well as into the global art world.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Gannit has published numerous books, catalogs and articles about modern and contemporary art viewed from a global perspective. Her books and essays have been published in 10 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish. She is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking scholarship on Frida Kahlo. She is part of the curatorial team that has organized major Kahlo exhibitions in London, New York and San Francisco, with the next stops being in Holland, Paris, Spain and Japan. Closer to home, both the Rose's 60th anniversary show, "re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum," and a focused research-based exhibition, "Frida Kahlo: POSE," will open at the Rose at the end of this month.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Gannit earned her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to Brandeis, she has taught at Harvard University, Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Hebrew University and MIT, where she currently serves as Brandeis University's representative on the board of directors of the Graduate Consortium of Women Studies. Thank you Gannit for speaking to us today, we look forward to your presentation.
Gannit Ankori:
Wow, what a nice introduction. Thank you, Sharon. And thanks to everyone for inviting me to join you this afternoon, and I look forward to reciprocate and host you at the Rose in person very soon. We should be opening at the end of June. So without further ado, I'm going to share my screen and talk a little bit about the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. So I have to say that I'm thrilled to share some images, historical highlights, and a sneak peek at our upcoming exhibitions with all of you this afternoon.
Gannit Ankori:
So I want to start with the history of Brandeis University and the Rose Art Museum. They carved a bold and luminous trajectory that brought us here today, and that we hope we're continuing. Established in 1948 as a university that would accept all qualified students and professors regardless of race, sex or creed during a time of discrimination, biases, exclusions, a quota system. Brandeis University was founded on the values of excellence, social justice, and inclusion from its inception. But I'm telling this to Brandeis alums or parents who already know this.
Gannit Ankori:
So Brandeis was way ahead of its time, and the only sad thing is that these values are still needed more than ever today. So what you're seeing now is the first graduating class of 1952. First commencement 69 years ago was celebrated with the Festival of the Arts. It was a display of cutting edge music, dance, performances and art, brought together by Leonard Bernstein, who was a Brandeis professor of music and the first head of the school of creative arts. He invited the most daring and experimental artists of the day, who have since become iconic. And I think you probably saw Merce Cunningham in the clip.
Gannit Ankori:
The significance of the creative arts at Brandeis was further established on campus with the opening of the Rose Art Museum in June of 1961. And here you see the very, very beginning. Yes, this means that this year and this very month mark our 60th anniversary, and I hope you will all join us in our fall celebration when we mark our anniversary. Probably in November, so stay tuned.
Gannit Ankori:
From the beginning, the vision for the Rose was as a center for artists, for creativity, for innovation, for engagement with artists and art. So we had residencies even before the Rose opened, with Marc Chagall. Here, you see him with Eleanor Roosevelt, who was of course a staunch supporter of our beloved university. And on the left we see Jacob Lawrence, who came in 1965 as an artist-in-residence, and he spoke later of the impactfulness of this residency. And he was also incredibly important to our students and the campus community, especially in a decade where many were engaged in the civil rights movement, and Brandeis hosted Reverend Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. And it was a very interesting time, which will also be on view in our collections show.
Gannit Ankori:
We continue this tradition of bringing artists to campus to engage with the Rose. And part of what we have been doing is bringing artists through the Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence. Here, you see Tony Lewis in the same stairwell where I am now, except we have a different configuration now with the lights coming in through the window. And here you see Tony working with Brandeis students. So they get to work on an artwork with the artist and engage with him. Here you see Jennie C. Jones, whose work is also going to be in our show. And here she is with musicians as her work kind of interrogates the liminal space between the visual and the oral. Our next Perlmutter recipient is Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, a Native American artist who will be coming next academic year.
Gannit Ankori:
So before prizes for artists were commonplace, the Brandeis Creative Arts Awards and medals were launched with established and emerging artists from all fields honored by Brandeis for their contributions to the world. And here you see some of the amazing names that most of them you, for sure, recognize.
Gannit Ankori:
About seven years ago, my colleagues and I worked to revive the Brandeis Creative Arts Award as a biennial award and residency, and it rotates between theater, music, visual arts, and I think we're planning to include film as well. And last March, I would say a nanosecond before COVID closed down our campus and basically the world as we know it, Fred Wilson, a brilliant artist, MacArthur Fellow, really incredible person came to the Rose. Here you see him with our two Rose interns, Hannah and Emma, and with Anita Hill, who is a member of the Rose board of advisors. So Fred came, engaged with our community. And in a couple of years, we are planning to have him back for a solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum.
Gannit Ankori:
The way that Brandeis diverged from the path of other universities, the Rose too was unlike any other university museum. Instead of collecting one or two items from each culture or epoch for teaching purposes even if the quality of the items was not top notch, the Rose devoted itself from the very beginning to the NEW, the NOW, and the NEXT. The first legendary director, Sam Hunter together with Brandeis' founding president, Abe Sachar, received the Mnuchin Gevirtz donation of $50,000. They proceeded to acquire what very few people were collecting at the time, contemporary art with a cap of $5,000 per artwork. Well, the contemporary art of the 1960s, which they purchased, often directly off the walls of the artist studios, forged the foundation of the Rose Art Museum's stellar and unparalleled permanent collection. It was bold, it was daring, a gamble, but it was also a stroke of precient, genius, no less.
Gannit Ankori:
So our iconic pieces acquired during the first decade of the museum's existence, which have now become part of the canon of postwar art, include the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning. What was in Robert Indiana's "Calumet," which we'll discuss in a little bit. What in 1962 was transgressive pop art, this painting by Roy Lichtenstein that borrows the visual vocabulary from comic books, introducing a new fluidity between high and low visual culture. Andy Warhol's powerful and provocative silk screens that interrogate the fissures, violence, voyeurism and sensationalism of American life. Ellsworth Kelly represented a new geometric abstraction that diverged from de Kooning's more expressive gestural brushstrokes. And this work, by the way, brought Ellsworth Kelly to campus several times the last time, to talk about this work, and to receive an honorary degree from Brandeis University.
Gannit Ankori:
This is an assemblage by Robert Rauschenberg called "Second Time Painting." It's a fragmentation and fracturing of time and space, which has inspired a lot of our current show. And Sam Hunter was ahead of his time collecting women artists, which was also not done frequently at that time. We own two sculptures and several works on paper by Marisol. And incredibly, he also collected the work of the then unknown Japanese artist, Kusama, who has since become an international superstar.
Gannit Ankori:
In addition to enhancing the collection with exciting and pathbreaking art, the Rose established a long tradition of mounting cutting edge rotating exhibitions for emerging and underrepresented artists. I just brought two examples, although there's so many. Louise Nevelson had her very first museum show at the Rose. And here you see that she herself installed it. So installation art was not a thing, but she was involved in every aspect of curating her own exhibition.
Gannit Ankori:
And the Rose in 1970 conceptualized and presented the first ever museum exhibition devoted to as yet a named field of video art with this Vision and Television exhibition that is still considered almost radical and revolutionary.
Gannit Ankori:
So we try to continue this work, I with my fabulous team. We want to enhance and diversify and grow our permanent collection. We also want to continue to mount exciting rotating exhibitions, not just based on our collection for canonical, but also emerging artists. And we always bring artists to campus to engage with our students, with the community. It's also a magnet for all our colleagues in the Boston area and beyond.
Gannit Ankori:
So today, I took an hour off from installing the riveting exhibitions. I hope you find them riveting, but the work of installing is just amazing. So we're reinstalling two exhibitions that will open at the end of the month. And what I want to do for the rest of my time with you, is just take you through a virtual tour or give you a sneak peek at both of them. So the first is a show of our permanent collection, titled "re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum." It was generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, and I curated this show with Dr. Elyan Hill and Caitlin Julia Rubin. The second rotating show is a research-based exhibition titled "Frida Kahlo: POSE," that I co-curated with my dear colleague and thought partner, Circe Henestrosa.
Gannit Ankori:
So the first part of "re: collections" is "re: presentations." And I'll have the Picasso in the background, because this is the first work when you come in. So "re: collections" casts a critical eye in two directions. Looking back at the radical roots from which the museum grew, and forward toward the potential for future transformations. So following the example of the artists the show features, "re: collections" challenges art historical conventions, categories, and cultural hierarchies, and charts alternative genealogies that link different artworks from different times, places, geographical locations, links them together in alternative genealogies. Now another thing is that the resilient creativity of the artists also inspired us to push against and alter the boundaries of the accepted and expected. This is what the artists do, sorry. Artists remix traditional materials and modes of art making in a way that expands what these very categories might be.
Gannit Ankori:
So the first part called "re: presentation" shows how, by taking representations that are made by others of certain groups, can be subverted and transfigured and reconfigured so that other artists speak for themselves and envision new worlds and ways of being. So we juxtaposed this Picasso, who's, of course, part of the canon and part of the master narrative, with a little known Beauford Delaney, who we've had this magnificent painting since before the Rose opened. But it was never shown. Beauford Delaney is not well-known like Picasso, but he was an exceptional African American artist who lived in New York as a gay man in Greenwich Village part of the day, and as part of the Harlem Renaissance in the evenings, where he met James Baldwin and was a mentor to him.
Gannit Ankori:
We juxtapose these two works not just because they're in dialogue. Formally with the color schemes, this is the way it's hanging on the walls, but the lighting is not right yet. But this is a sneak peek, so here you go. Both artists also oscillate between figuration and abstraction in ways that are very, very similar. Another juxtaposition is, again, a canonical, iconic De Kooning with his gestural brushstrokes. And also we have some works by him that is this abstract work, but he also had some works that were in figuration. And like this one from MoMA "Woman I," and we juxtapose it with Robert Colescott who in the '70s, interrogated the style, but also brought race and gender in the mix. And this is the way we hung it a couple of weeks ago at the Rose where you see this dialog. So we're not going chronologically. We're going in a different way, different groupings.
Gannit Ankori:
The mammy figure that Colescott uses, which is very controversial, is kind of a cluster of works that address this in our first gallery, the Fineberg Gallery, where we have an Andy Warhol Polaroid, which is a portrait of Sylvia Williams that he transfigured into the mammy figure; calls it mammy. And this was the basis for a print that he made later on of mammy.
Gannit Ankori:
And juxtaposed with this representation of the other, the Black woman or negative stereotype of the Black woman, we have Betye Saar, an African American woman, who rehabilitates Aunt Jemima. Betye Saar thought deeply about the reuse of the mammy figure before she began to incorporate the image into her work. She herself explains, and I quote: "I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful negative images such as these, thinking about how white people saw Black people, and how that influenced the way in which Black people saw each other," end of quote. So Saar, like many of the artists, featured in the Fineberg Gallery, recognized the damaging impact of seeing oneself through the eyes of others and the importance of self-representation as a way to reclaim identities molded by damaging stereotypes and white supremacist values.
Gannit Ankori:
So the figure of the mammy here is also known as Aunt Jemima, which are ways of normalizing the exploitation of the domestic labor of Black women. So in the Rose piece titled "Supreme Quality," Saar emphasizes African American women's histories by mounting a found image of the mammy figure on a washboard once used for hand washing laundry. On the reverse side, a clock whose hands have been replaced by an American flag suggests the unending labor of Black women on whose backs much of the United States was built. And crucially, Saar reclaims the mammy figure as a warrior arming her with both weapons, she's holding two pistols, and words. And underneath it says, "extreme times call for extreme heroines." This representation conflates the white created stereotype of the mammy, with the ideas and imagery of the Black Power movement. So with force, Saar takes back a figure crafted through the lens of racism and makes her a heroine to fight these very forces. So these conversations that we create between the artworks really encourage viewers to think deeply about not just the artworks, but the conditions in which they were made.
Gannit Ankori:
The second example from this cluster is "Calumet" by Robert Indiana. This painting was one of the first works acquired by the Rose Art Museum's founding director, Sam Hunter. It was created in 1961, and it was in the collection already in 1962. And since then, it has been exhibited countless times. I've seen it countless times over the last decade. But mostly it's the context of pop art highlighting the work's formal elements and its affinity with the graphic design. But the painting's iconography, its meaning, the words prominently scribed within the composition and it's title "Calamet," have been given far less attention despite Indiana's explicit explanations about the meaning of the work.
Gannit Ankori:
So the words in circling, the painting, cite a canto titled "The Peace-Pipe" from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem, "The Song of the Hiawatha," which is a fictional tribe. Longfellow references the popular American and European term for Native American ceremonial pipes. And the poem proclaims, as we see in the text, on the mountain of the Prairie, Gitche Manito the mighty called the tribes of men together. And the seven smaller circles in the larger encompassing ring include the names of 14 North American tribes summoned by the heroic Indigenous protagonist. This relates to, and as Robert Indiana himself said, that he was lamenting the tragic fate of the original inhabitants of the land. But this was done, if you read Longfellow's poem, from a Christian colonial viewpoint that adopts a sympathetic yet patronizing stance towards a romanticized noble savage, if you will.
Gannit Ankori:
This representation of the native peoples of the United States, we juxtaposed here with two watercolors by Native American artists from the first part of the 20th century, or around the time that Indiana painted his work. And they are seen here on equal footing from representation of the Native Americans by Indiana, to self-representation by artists from Indigenous backgrounds.
Gannit Ankori:
So if we leave the gallery, we walk down to the Lower Rose Gallery, where the section called "re: tellings" is what we see. And we begin with works from the '60s of what was happening outside the museum as it amassed its collection of artworks. And this entire gallery is devoted to layered traumas that are documented by photojournalists and expressed by visual artists and that contain personal and collective histories laden with tragedy, sorrow and pain.
Gannit Ankori:
The works on view are very diverse in terms of time, place and artistic genre. And we see in all the galleries we have paintings, photographs, reliefs, sculpture, video, art, et cetera. And they all share a somber tone, a sense of compassion and resilience. And the specific experiences that are poetically recounted through these elements include the struggles for civil rights and racial justice in America, the Holocaust in World War II, this photograph by Weegee, this incredible piece by Christian Boltanski. We have photograph of the Spanish Civil War, and a beautiful large painting by Robert Motherwell that is an elegy for the Spanish Civil War. Other works relate to the AIDS epidemic, colonialist exploitation of South Africa, gender inequality, and the Atlantic slave trade. So please come and see all those rich and powerful artworks.
Gannit Ankori:
When we move to the large Foster gallery, the Lois Foster Wing, the first part is called "re: construction." And here we have shredded canvases that are re: constructions by Al Loving and Mark Bradford, collages and assemblages pieced together are welded by Robert Rauschenberg, Wakamatsu Kōichirō, a survivor of Hiroshima, and the "Lynch Fragments" by Melvin Edwards, and ash black wooden shards that are joined anew, attempting to become a circle, to become whole again, this is by Louise Nevelson. So all of these resonate as a kind of poetics of rupture and calamity, reflecting the broken pieces and places of a flawed world. But at the same time, such recurring gestures of fragmentation may be understood as intentional acts that carve out new paths of agency and transformation. So by challenging and dismantling long held conventions of art and its histories, artists boldly reconstruct their own narratives, invent visual vocabularies and art-making practices, and reimagine the space of and for art. And as I said before, the curatorial team followed their lead in trying to map out these strategies through the work of artists from our very early pieces to our much later pieces.
Gannit Ankori:
So there are two additional sections, that again, you'll have to come and see, "re: citations" and "re: visions." I think I have one picture here of "re: citations" where you see Jim Dine, and this we hung yesterday afternoon, so fresh and beautiful. I would say that the bilateral process of deconstruction on the one hand, and the mending of fragments and putting them back together on the other, activates many of the works presented throughout the show. And they're all gathered from across the globe and brought into close proximity to each other. And these expected and unexpected groupings have the power to spark new insights and to launch probing and significant conversations that I really look forward to having you when you come and visit the Rose.
Gannit Ankori:
And this is what our stairwell looks like now. We have a beautiful vinyl on the windows of the stairwell and the facade that casts such beautiful lights that constantly shift and change, like our perception of the arts. So parallel to this, really what I hope will be an extraordinary exhibition and I truly, truly invite you to come and see it and promise everyone here a personal tour, if you will.
Gannit Ankori:
The second exhibition is smaller, no less fun to curate, and it is titled "Frida Kahlo: POSE." I have about five, six minutes, so I'll just walk you through the sections very quickly. There are five intersecting... Before that, the works will be from her first year. She was born in 1907. This is from 1908 through her deathbed. And it's not just the photograph of her on her deathbed, it's also two paintings that were her last self-portraits. And here you see a photograph that her father took of her when she was a toddler. This is the Frida Kahlo, the iconic Tehuana woman that we all know that has become kind of a cultural phenomenon today, and this is taken by her friend Lola Álvarez Bravo when she was on her deathbed.
Gannit Ankori:
The artworks like the photographs are from one of Kahlo's earliest pieces when she was just a teenager, and she made this print of two women, that is for her friend's book. We have this painting of Kahlo in her prime. Beautiful, beautiful work of her with the Xoloitzcuintli dog. And this very last self-portrait where not only is she disintegrating, but also her mode of painting, her brushstrokes, show the deterioration of her life. And she herself wrote in her diary, and I quote, "I am the disintegration" at that point.
Gannit Ankori:
So the first section... It's five intersecting sections. The first one is called "Posing," and it traces Kahlo's predilection for posing first for photographs, and later for her self-portraits. And that posing was such an important part of her being, performing her identities in front of the camera. And my colleague, Circe and I noted that really posing in front of photographers was her first mode of self-expression long before she painted or made art. So we trace it throughout. These are all by her father. And we also note how her self-portraiture is influenced, impacted by photographs of her, and we see it very, very clearly. And this drawing, which is an unfinished drawing, is part of the show. Will be on view. Later in life, we see photographs of her and this beautiful fresco self-portrait also on view in the exhibition. You see the similarities of posing for photographs and posing for self-portraits.
Gannit Ankori:
The second section is called "Composing." And not only did she construct her identity and perform different identities, but she also constructed her look. Here you see her braiding and unbraiding her hair. This is a by Julien Levy, a gallerist, who gave her her first show in New York in 1938. And he said it was like a ritual to watch her braid and unbraid her hair with yarns, with flowers, et cetera. And here you see her telling us that she is composing herself. So fixing her hair, fixing her head, the angle of her head, fixing her dress, but also composing a drawing. And this idea of Kahlo as an artist, Kahlo composing works of art, not just her look, is something very central to this exhibition. An entire section will have these ideas or these photographs showing her all composed, but composing art. Even when she was in the hospital and bedridden, she continued to paint until the very end. And we have her painting also this painting that we will highlight.
Gannit Ankori:
The third section, sorry it says two, this should be three, is "Exposing." Our thesis is that while she posed and composed everything, she also, through her art, exposed inner aspects of her being, both physical and mental and ideological. So here you see her lifting the huipil, which is the Tehuana tunic, and underneath, she reveals her corset. She had two traumas, medical traumas, she had polio at the age of six, she had a near fatal accident in 1925 when she was 18, and in 1932, she had a near fatal miscarriage. So she was disabled throughout her life. She called it a broken body, but here she reveals that aspect. She doesn't hide behind the beautiful Tehuana persona. And she reveals both her political stance and the internal workings of her body. And it's very interesting also that the corsets that she needed as medical support, she transformed them into works of art. And then she also painted them in her works of art. So her art and life were very interestingly intertwined.
Gannit Ankori:
So we address some of the political aspects. This is a really important photograph for me, because this is 11 days before her death. When she, against doctor's orders, left her hospital bed and went out to demonstrate in the streets of Mexico. And we also will show her kind of visual narration of her miscarriage and saga and place in the world. This lithograph, her first and last, her first and only lithograph, further exposes. So she doesn't just lift her huipil shows a corset, she also shows what's happening inside her body. This is a very, very crucial piece because this is when she takes the palette in her hand and becomes an artist after this miscarriage.
Gannit Ankori:
Another section is called "Queering," and it relates to Kahlo's fluid gender identity and multiple intimate relationships with both men and women, and from a very early age. This is her as a teenager posing for her father, again, in a very conventional family settings. She is cross dressing, she is posing like a dandy. And another thing that's really interesting, this is after polio and the accident, and she probably needed a cane to walk, but she transformed it into an accessory, making it a fashion statement like taking her difference and transposing it into kind of a specialness or a uniqueness.
Gannit Ankori:
And what is really fun is that we get to show some of the works from the Rose collection in close proximity with Kahlo's show. So that she was so ahead of her time, and many of the themes and concepts that her work grapples with are explored today by different artists from Allen Ginsberg and Gillespie, Patti Smith, Ajamu, Nan Goldin and others. So the Rose permanent collection is kind of in dialogue with our "Frida Kahlo: POSE."
Gannit Ankori:
And our very last section is "Self-fashioning," and this should be five. And here, we have many of the iconic color photographs that Nickolas Muray took of her. And showing how she fashioned herself, how she performed in front of the camera, and many, many other things.
Gannit Ankori:
So this is where I end. I want to thank you for paying attention if you did, and thank you for taking time to be with me, and allowing me to share what's happening at the Rose. So Sharon, maybe there are questions?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Sure. Thank you, Gannit. So just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you can please drop it in the Q&A box at the bottom. So to start, we have a couple notes and a question. So a class of 1975 alum notes, I worked at the Rose from 1973 to 1975 and hung about half the shows. This talk brings back very good memories.
Gannit Ankori:
Thank you. I want to use this opportunity to say that's fantastic. I don't know if there's a name attached to that, but I hope there is. We have interns and we're actually growing our internship program. We have a summer intern, we have two other interns, and we're trying to really grow the internship program and establish the Rose as a pipeline for our museum professionals, and finding a lot of work for students, but also for others. So I'm really, really glad that you got to hang shows at the Rose, and I know what a pleasure it is, because that's what we're doing now. And I welcome you to come and introduce yourself.
Gannit Ankori:
Also, if you could keep on the lookout for an anniversary party that we will have probably the weekend of November 6th and 7th, and I hope a lot of people who found themselves in the Rose will come. What is this? 160 an hour? Oh, my God! That was a long time ago, wasn't it? I have to say that we pay equitably now. We pay more than the minimum and more than others, because to be a Rose intern, you need very special qualifications. So HR allows us to do that.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, and thank you. And actually, another comment came in the chat saying, "I worked at the Rose from 2000 to 2001 and remember it fondly." And that segues very nicely into a note slash question from a former student saying, "I took your art and trauma course when I was a freshman at Brandeis, and that experience continues to impact my thoughts, my art and my work. Thank you for who you are and all that you do." My question is, are there any opportunities for alumni who are emerging artists to show their work at the Rose?
Gannit Ankori:
Well, first of all, thank you for your kind words. Is there a name attached to that? I want to know who my former student... I have so many former students. And my students know that they're number one. I really, really love teaching. In fact, this year, my first year of being Rose director and chief curator, so coming into the job, reopening, COVID closure, two exhibitions that are huge, uplifting the museum and wonderful staff rehiring, et cetera, I still taught three courses. Which is not advisable, it's a little too much, but I love teaching and that's important. So right now, the Rose is in a situation where we don't have enough space to show all our collection, and it is a magnificent collection. And we also don't show fine arts faculty work. But we are thinking about ways to change that and to have more opportunities for engagement with our artists, alumni artists, and with our faculty artists as well. This is a conversation we're just beginning to have.
Gannit Ankori:
The other problem, and I can just speak to it very frankly, is that if I show one alum, how will all the 500 others who are artists feel? And how does that work? We are all for equity and equal opportunity and inclusiveness, so I think we do need to think about alumni exhibitions and faculty exhibitions, and how the Rose can partner with our artists alums better. Please reach out to me and we can talk about this.
Gannit Ankori:
By the way, there was also a conversation. One of the things that I did at the beginning of the academic year was to put together the Rose campus council. The council includes faculty, students and staff from the Brandeis community, not just from the arts. And we think together how we can better integrate the Rose into the community and into the curriculum and into the fabric of our campus. We were also thinking of constituting an alumni council. I was just talking to one of my former students who was also a Rose intern, and she was very enthusiastic about having alums who are artists also work with us maybe a couple of times a year to think about all these issues that come up. That should be a conversation, not a decision that's handed down to everyone.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great, thank you. So we just have a couple more minutes, and there's a few questions. So if you don't mind, I'm going to actually throw them all together.
Gannit Ankori:
Okay
Sharon Rosenberg:
So there's a couple questions on visiting museum and one is about, is admission free to the museum? And then another question about these exhibits that you previewed and the timing, for how long they're going to be on display.
Gannit Ankori:
Okay, let me answer those two and then... So the Rose does not charge admissions. Coming into the Rose is free for all, always. And that's part of our worldview. We want to be accessible and inclusive, and we want there to be equity. So no one needs to pay anything to come in. Saying that, we do need funds to run the museum. So if anyone here feels a move to join our membership program or our donor circle or just to donate something so that we can continue to be free, we will be thrilled. But free. The "re: collections" show will be up for three years with rotations. So the basic structure will be up, but there will be rotations. Because works on paper, photographs, they need to be replaced. We're showing, let's say, two Goya prints and then we'll show two others. Same with Kandinsky prints, et cetera, et cetera. Just name-dropping, so you'll want to come.
Gannit Ankori:
The Frida Kahlo show will be up until mid December, so still a long time. The museum should be open by June 25th. I think we'll finish installing on the 24th. And on our website and social media, you can look up. I think that you will need to make reservations, and there'll be some instructions. We're still asking people to be masked, but I think we're not limiting the number anymore. We're following both Brandeis and Massachusetts guidelines. Sharon?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes. Thank you. Okay, so last question is actually going to be a two-parter, because they're about questions about what will be on display. The question is, do you still have a piece or pieces by Ralph Coburn, a friend of Ellsworth Kelly? That's one question. And the other question is, the wonderful Carl Belz was a curator while I was at Brandeis in 1976 to 1980. Is there anything to remember him at the Rose?
Gannit Ankori:
So we did buy Coburn just, I believe, two years ago. I was on the collections committee, and I was really, really happy that we received it. And this piece, which is composite, it was composed of several pieces, was on view before. So it was on view, so now we're trying to kind of show things that haven't been on view recently. It's not on view now, but it's an idea. It might be in one of the next rotations of our collection show. I want to just agree that he's a fabulous painter, and I just was looking through the catalog of his work. So thank you for that question.
Gannit Ankori:
Now, Carl Belz is remembered. There's several pieces that are actually devoted to him. A lot of our board members remember him fondly as the person when they wanted to be lawyers or economists, they took an art history class with him, and that changed their life. And now they're into the arts and part of the Rose board of advisors. So he is remembered. And I think for the anniversary, I've been doing a lot of research, we've been doing some digging about what each of our wonderful, well, I would say my predecessors brought into the collection. What did they bring that was new? And I think since Sam Hunter, every single director added to the scaffolding, and now we have this tremendous collection that represents the vision of so many different people. And that's a great way to find diversity. So yeah. Sharon, other questions?
Sharon Rosenberg:
So just one logistical question. Will you do a virtual tour of both of these exhibits at some point?
Gannit Ankori:
I will do an actual tour. Yeah, I think that we will do a virtual tour and even record it so that it's evergreen, so that people can go back to it. So would you like me to do it? Yes. Do I like to talk about art? Oh, my God, too much.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Well, thank you very much for spending time with us this afternoon, for showing us this preview. We look forward to being able to come to the Rose and see these wonderful pieces. And I would encourage everyone to check out the Rose website, brandeis.edu/rose, sign up for the Rose email list, come to events, be on the lookout for all different things happening in the coming months, and we'll look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much.