ROSE ART MUSEUM

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Museums Tell Me They Hate Me

This is the contortion act "meritocracy" often performs for capital.

While not a problem unique to the museum or art worlds, James Payne’s project on the impact of unpaid internships, Museums Tell Me They Hate Me, should be required reading for everyone in the field. Download a digital copy of his book here.

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Her Private Papers by Geoffrey O'Brien

I remember hearing of Patti Smith first as a neighborhood rumor and then, by the time she was performing widely, a local legend who managed to combine the roles of poet, visual artist, and rock and roller, a skeletally thin black-clad androgynous merging of Rimbaud and Pirate Jenny, or of Irma Vep and one of William Burroughs’s Wild Boys. When it came out in 1975, Smith’s first album, Horses, caught the ear with the rough edges of a homegrown vatic protopunk utterance right from the opening track with its declaration that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” and its reworking of Van Morrison’s “Gloria”—“Oh I put my spell on her here she comes/Walking down the street here she comes/Coming through my door here she comes/Crawling up my stair here she comes”—to assert that rock and roll really did belong to anybody with the nerve to transform it into whatever sort of poetry she desired.

Geoffrey O’Brien on the latest by Patti Smith:

M Train might be taken as a most roundabout and leisurely way of answering the question “How have you been?” The answer comes in the form of fragments of waking fantasy, literary commentaries, extended reminiscences, evocations of lost objects, travel notations, tallies of places and names and flavors (“Lists. Small anchors in the swirl of transmitted waves, reverie, and saxophone solos”). By turns it is daybook, dreambook, commonplace book. Under all lies a grief that is never allowed to overwhelm the writing but is, it would seem, its groundwater. She allows herself to begin anywhere and break off anywhere, thus realizing the secret yearning of almost anyone who sits down to write a book: that it might be possible for the thing simply to create itself out of necessity, to emerge as if by a natural process of unfolding.

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Talking with the porn-inspired artist whose work we mostly can’t show you

Lisa Yuskavage, critically acclaimed but not at all softened, on her solo show at the Rose Art Museum.

Oh that clever copy editor. Geoff Edgers interviews Lisa Yuskavage for the Washington Post:

Did you ever think about softening your work? Maybe making it a little less explicit? There was that point where you were basically unknown.

It was worse than an unknown. I was a tainted unknown. There is something worse than being unknown. My response to things, especially back then, was to step on the throttle again, harder. I decided I was making art for myself and I would just make the art I wished somebody else was making. I was going around to galleries, and there was a kind of art that was not being made, but nobody was making the thing I was looking for. I felt like, “Nobody likes my work anyway, so I might as well plow through here.”

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One of the great things about Boston is that we have one of the top art critics in the country taking a careful look at the exhibitions happening both here and further afield. Here’s Sebastian Smee’s thoughtful criticism of Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, now on view at the Rose.

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Inch by inch, putting it together.

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Starting this fall, the Rose will have new hours. Open Wednesday - Sunday, with our usual 12-5 on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, there will now be extended hours on Friday and Saturday, 12-7.

Come enjoy the Rose at night!

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A New Chrome Extension Turns Your Browser Into an Archive of Cat Art

It is a tired maxim that the Internet basically exists to help us find pictures of cats. That particular search just got a lot easier—and a lot classier—thanks to Meow Met, a new Chrome extension. Designed by Emily McAllister for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Media Lab, Meow Met shows...

We were not kidding. We love cats. Art + Cats = Basically peak Rose staff interests. 

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We’re pretty obsessed with cats here at the Rose – I’m sensing a staff field trip in the near future.

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Review: ‘Pretty Raw’ Recounts Helen Frankenthaler’s Influence on the Art World

An exhibition at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Mass., tells how Ms. Frankenthaler became a leading figure in Color Field painting.

WALTHAM, Mass. —  A groundbreaking show at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University here clears a more prominent place for Helen Frankenthaler in the history of postwar New York painting. “Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler” re-examines her 1952 invention of stain-painting and traces some of its repercussions up to the present . . .

. . .[In] a way that eludes most exhibitions that include contemporary art, “Pretty Raw” is gorgeous, full of fresh insights and diverse yet coherent, connected throughout by a formal rather than a literary theme: color used freely and inventively often at full strength — in liquid, process-oriented ways. Another through line is feminist thought and its aesthetic ramifications, especially in painting, with “the feminine” as both a stereotype to be shattered and an artistic potential to be explored. Above all there is the implication that it remains in many ways implicitly political for a woman to paint.

Break out the celebration dances, this NYT review has us floating through the rest of Pretty Raw’s run.

Come see what all the fuss is about, open through Sunday.

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tbt to 50 years ago, a totally different Rose.

Two Urbanists: The Engineering-Architecture of R. Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri

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Burning Boards, from set up to tear down.

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Burning Boards tonight is being plagued by wind. Rather than keep the audience away, they're getting closer and acting as human windbreaks. Art collaboration at its finest.

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We’re loving #poseMW day, the final day of #MuseumWeek, for all of these great visitor photos.

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But of course our actual #favMW thing is you, the visitors. Cue studio audience ‘awwwwww’ #MuseumWeek #CheesyButTrue

— The Rose Art Museum (@RoseArtMuseum)

March 28, 2015

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Korean Museum Uses Adorable Cats in Visitor Etiquette Guide

(Visitor etiquette guide from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, photo via John Overholt/Twitter; text from Andrea Fraser’s “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique” in Artforum, September 2005)

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Some helpful (and adorable) tips on bringing your #familyMW to a museum.

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Remember when the Rose had a pond? 🌊

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One staff member’s shelf of #souvenirsMW includes a rock from the pond that used to be in our Lower Rose Gallery and a reminder of home with a mini Arch from the Museum of Westward Expansion gatewayarchstl #museumweek