Rose Art Museum Sets Spring 2016 Exhibitions

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has announced its Spring 2016 exhibitions: Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?; Sharon Lockhart/Noa Eshkol; and Rose Video 08 | Ben Hagari, on view February 12 - June 5. Joyce Pensato's site-specific Foster Mural, Felix at the Rose, and Mark Dion's permanent installation, The Undisciplined Collector, will remain on view. Rose Collection | #FordHall2015 will transform the Lee Gallery into a community gathering space dedicated to art and activism. An opening reception will be held Thursday, February 11, 5-9 p.m.

ROSALYN DREXLER: WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?

Upper Fineberg & Lower Rose Galleries

February 12 - June 5, 2016

An historic, monographic exhibition, Who Does She Think She Is? is a long-overdue retrospective of Rosalyn Drexler's multidisciplinary practice. Showcasing Drexler's major paintings and collages as well as her captivating early sculptures, award winning plays and novels, and photographic and video documentation of the artist's wild and varied theatrical career, the exhibition is co-curated by Rose Curator-at-Large Katy Siegel and Curatorial Assistant Caitlin Julia Rubin.

Drexler has been an active participant in New York's artistic scene, and her collages and large format paintings-which borrow imagery from movies, advertisements, and newspapers of the 1960s-reverberate with the Pop art of her contemporaries. Yet Drexler's work unfolds personal and social conflict with a political consciousness rare in the cool art of that moment and an explicitness that fearlessly courts vulgarity. A vivid portrait of both Drexler's singular artistic persona and the artistic circles of which she was a vibrant and fluid part, Who Does She Think She Is? shows Drexler to be both a sharp critic of and a joyful participant in American culture of the past 50 years.

SHARON LOCKHART/NOA ESHKOL

Lois Foster Gallery

February 12 - June 5, 2016

In this multi-channel film installation, Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart explores the extraordinary work of Noa Eshkol (1924-2007), the Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist whose achievements include the development in the 1950s of a revolutionary dance notation system that categorized movements of the body through numbers and symbols. Although the two women never met-Lockhart only discovered Eshkol's work during a 2008 trip to Israel-the project is conceived as a two-person exhibition, highlighting a fascinating artistic convergence between past and present, as a contemporary artist activates the work of a modernist composer through her archive. Collaborating with Eshkol's students as well as a newer generation of dancers, Lockhart staged and filmed performances of Eshkol's choreography in a minimal, gallery-like setting punctuated only by Eshkol's remarkable wall carpets, rotated from dance to dance like elements in a stage set. In the final work, films of five different dances are projected simultaneously on freestanding walls, allowing visitors to reflect upon their own movement as they traverse the exhibition space.

Organized by Rose Curator Kim Conaty, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol was first presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

ROSE VIDEO 08 | BEN HAGARI

Rose Video Gallery

February 12 - June 5, 2016

Ben Hagari's Potter's Will (2015) melds the prehistoric art of pottery making with contemporary video art, reconfiguring primordial myths related to creation and destruction, life and death. In this multimedia installation, organized by Faculty Curator Gannit Ankori, a potter's rotating studio is on display as both a physical site and a projected sight, inviting the audience to engage in an immersive experience.

The first part of the video documents the transformation of a lump of clay into a beautiful pot, molded by the masterful hands of Paul Chaleff. The potter's wheel - like the eye of the storm - is strangely still within the whirling set. The next section follows the pot's metamorphosis into a clay-covered human being, confronted by the kiln's fire. Deliberate allusions range from Adam and the serpent of Genesis to ancient Egypt's divine potter Khnum. Additional archetypal references include the four elements (water, earth, wind and fire), geometric symbols (squares that transform into circles) and the tail-biting snake, the Uroboros.

Hagari is the inaugural recipient of The Chami Fruchter Prize, a biennial award presented to an emerging Israeli video artist, administered jointly by the Rose Art Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. A publication, co-edited by Ankori, will accompany the exhibition.

ROSE COLLECTION | #FORDHALL2015

Lee Gallery

February 2016 - June 2017

As mediators of culture, museums have a role to play in responding to critical social issues. The Rose Art Museum seeks to create spaces and programs that can be relied on in times of both peace and conflict. Inspired by the just demands of Brandeis University students for immediate actions that promote racial awareness and inclusion [#FordHall2015], the Rose Art Museum has committed its Lee Gallery to a series of teach-ins, workshops, and close looking sessions related to injustice and inequality. Art from the museum's permanent collection will be displayed in this space to serve as a catalyst for partnerships and conversations regarding issues of cultural bias, race, and the intersection of art and activism.

FOSTER MURAL: JOYCE PENSATO

Foster Stairwell

September 12, 2015 - June 5, 2016

Brooklyn-born-raised-and-based artist Joyce Pensato has created Felix at the Rose, a site-specific mural for the Rose's Foster Stairwell. Inspired by cartoon characters and comic book heroes, her work speaks to the fractured American psyche, addressing race, ethnicity and notions of beauty. Pensato reveals a darker side of American Pop, imbuing familiar figures of American cartoon culture with psychological charge and emboldening them with aggressive, gestural physicality.

MARK DION: THE UNDISCIPLINED COLLECTOR

Permanent Installation

Wood paneled and furnished with the trappings of a 1961 collector's den, The Undisciplined Collector evokes the year of the Rose Art Museum's founding and serves as an introduction to the rich history of collecting at Brandeis University. For his permanent installation, Mark Dion selected objects from the Rose's permanent collection and related collections across campus (Brandeis University Library's Special Collections, the Classical Artifact Research Collection, and the Department of Anthropology's Study Collection, as well as Brandeis Athletics' collection of trophies), creating an immersive and interactive environment that adds both context and back story to the present-day Rose.

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