Rose Art Museum Announces Spring 2018 Exhibitions

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has announced its spring exhibitions-Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded, Blueprint for Counter Education, and Praying for Time, selections from the Rose collection at the turn of the millennium-on view March 2 - July 8, 2018. Remaining on view will be Tony Lewis' site-specific mural Plunder, and Mark Dion's permanent installation The Undisciplined Collector (2015). A free public opening reception to celebrate the museum's spring exhibition season will be held 7-9pm on Thursday, March 1.

Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded

Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg Gallery

Based in observation, improvisation, and memory, this selection of recent work by Jennifer Packer (b. 1984) presents paintings of funerary bouquets and intimate portraits. Pointing to possibilities both fragile and strong, bodily and emotional, her works exhibit a rigorous engagement with art history as well as a highly expressive personal response to how black bodies navigate within the present political landscape.

Packer's figurative paintings are marked by a powerful quietude. Each canvas reads as a self-contained world, its subject emerging from or dissolving into its surroundings. She presents those who sit for her-usually family members and friends- with compassion, foregrounding their individual autonomy and carefully guarding their integrity. The funerary bouquet provides the subject for an ongoing series of paintings that suggest themes of trauma and loss. One of the most striking examples is "Say Her Name," a work that takes its title from the social media movement calling on people to publicize the names of black women killed by police.

Organized by The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Tenderheaded is Packer's first solo institutional exhibition. The Rose will be the only touring venue for the show.

Blueprint for Counter Education

Mildred S. Lee Gallery

Inaugurated during the volatile and transformative late 1960s, the unconventional publication Blueprint for Counter Education introduced the tools for a radical transformation of liberal arts education. A project of Brandeis Sociology Professor and Chair Maurice Stein and his teaching assistant, Larry Miller, this boxed set of posters and texts encouraged students to shape an educational environment from their own lived experiences, bridging disciplinary divides to create a socially engaged mode of learning. Blueprint's open-ended charts mapped a world of ideas, from the avant-garde to the postmodern, in a form that presaged the Internet, allowing participants to chart multiple courses of thinking and discovery that anticipated the prevalence of search engines, social media, and the quick connection of the hyperlink.

Organized by Caitlin Julia Rubin, Assistant Curator, the exhibition is part of Art + Tech, a citywide collaboration of 14 Boston-area arts organizations initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston to recognize the outsized role greater Boston has played in the history and development of technology. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today will be on view at the ICA from February 7 - May 20, 2018.

Praying for Time

Lower Rose and Foster Galleries

Praying for Time draws from the Rose Art Museum's permanent collection to reflect the diversity of voices and concerns in art produced during the pivotal period of the late '80s through early 2000s. Marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the attacks on September 11th, and civil wars, the end of the 20th century can also be viewed as the start of an immense global, social, and digital revolution that forever transformed our world. Featuring work in a variety of media by a roster of international figures, including Matthew Barney, Ellen Gallagher, Nan Goldin, Leon Golub, Mona Hatoum, Tracey Moffatt, Damián Ortega, Andrés Serrano, and Zhang Huan, Praying for Time illuminates this critical period through a selection of highlights from the Rose's deep holdings and recent acquisitions.

Praying for Time is organized by Luis Croquer, Lois and Henry Foster Director and Chief Curator of the Rose Art Museum.

Continuing at the Rose . . .

Tony Lewis: Plunder

Foster Mural

Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis (b. 1986) has created a new, site-specific drawing for the outward-facing wall of the Rose Art Museum's Lois Foster Wing, extending his ongoing investigations of the relationships between drawing, abstraction, and language. As the museum's 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence, Lewis made this mural-the artist's first solo museum presentation in the Northeast-with the help of Brandeis University students. Using screws and graphite-dipped rubber bands, Lewis and his collaborators generated a large line drawing in the form of a Gregg shorthand notation, the stenographic script similar to abbreviated cursive. Rising in loose arcs across the expanse of the Foster wall, the drawing is an abstracted symbol of the word "plunder," from which the work takes its name.

MARK DION: THE UNDISCIPLINED COLLECTOR

Permanent Installation

Foster Stair Landing

In The Undisciplined Collector, Mark Dion invites visitors into a wood-paneled living room designed to evoke the early 1960's, the era in which the Rose Art Museum was founded. An immersive and interactive space, the installation serves as an introduction to the Rose and to the history of collecting at Brandeis. A recently published guide to Dion's project accompanies the permanent installation, with an inventory of included works and a conversation between the artist and Assistant Curator Caitlin Julia Rubin.

ABOUT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

Founded in 1961, The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is among the nation's premier university museums dedicated to collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting modern and contemporary art. A center of cultural and intellectual life on campus, the Museum serves as a catalyst for the exchange of ideas: a place of discovery, intersection, and dialogue at the university and within the Greater Boston community. Through its collection, exhibitions, and programs, the Rose works to affirm and advance the values of social justice, freedom of expression, global diversity, and academic excellence that are hallmarks of Brandeis University. Postwar American and international contemporary art are particularly well represented within the Rose's renowned permanent collection of more than 9,000 objects.

Located on Brandeis University's campus at 415 South Street, Waltham, MA, the museum is free and open to the public Wednesday through Sunday, 11 AM - 5 PM.

For more information, visit www.brandeis.edu/rose/ or call 781-736-3434.