The Rose Art Museum Announces 2019-2020 Ruth Ann And Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Caroline Woolard

The Rose Art Museum has selected Caroline Woolard (American, b. 1984) as this year's 2019-2020 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence. The Perlmutter Award recognizes extraordinary young talent and is part of the Rose's longstanding tradition of promoting the work of emerging artists. The year-long residency at the museum is also an opportunity to provide Brandeis University students and faculty with direct access to powerful contemporary art and ideas. In addition, Woolard is the Rose Art Museum's inaugural INDEX artist. In her work at the Rose, Woolard takes the meeting as a site for artistic and social intervention by combining the formal language of her sculptural practice with tools and techniques used for group facilitation.

"I believe it is crucial to examine and mine processes of human communication, conflict mediation, and resolution. Sharing, discussing, and reconciling multiple points of view has always been a vital part of radical creative and social processes and is something that Caroline Woolard explores with openness and intent in her work," says Luis A. Croquer, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator. "I am thrilled to share Caroline's timely work with the Brandeis community. We remain forever indebted to Ruth Ann Perlmutter for the legacy she and her husband established that allows us to bring important working artists to the museum, and for their belief in art as an essential tool to expand minds."

INDEX, a new initiative at the museum, acts as an interdisciplinary and evolving inquiry, linking the museum's role as an exhibition space with a diversity of academic, educational, and public programs. Site-responsive, artist-driven projects guide INDEX's path, acting both as event and exhibition to create a dynamic and constantly changing program. Like a book's index, the project is comprised of individual entries-presentations that rotate on a bi-annual basis-yet serves also to reorganize, cross-reference, and establish new relationships to content.

Woolard's The Meeting Game (2019- ), installed for the duration of her residency, rewrites the conventional meeting format to investigate new systems for collaboration and cooperation. Woolard's proposition designates the Lee Gallery as a space for generative dialogue and invites participants to explore more open, aware, and intentional exchanges by using and collectively contributing to The Meeting Game's evolving platform.

The Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award is part of the Rose's longstanding tradition of promoting young artists. Past honorees have included Tuesday Smillie, Tony Lewis, Jennie C. Jones, Mika Rottenberg, Dana Schutz, Xavier Veilhan, and Barry McGee.

Nathan Perlmutter served as national director of the Anti-Defamation League for eight years and was a vice president at Brandeis from 1969-73. Along with his wife, Ruth Ann, he championed the interfaith movement and sought to empower Jews, blacks and other minorities. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 1987, shortly before his death. Ruth Ann Perlmutter, a sculptor and painter, received degrees from the University of Denver and Wayne State University.

Caroline Woolard employs speculative objects, immersive installation, and online networks to imagine and enact systems of mutual aid and collaboration, exploring what she terms "the pleasures and pains of interdependence." Her work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. It has been exhibited in solo presentations at Cornell University Gallery, Ithaca; Dekalb Gallery, Pratt Institute, New York; and Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, among others. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies from numerous organizations, including the Pilchuck Glass School (2018), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2017), the Queens Museum (2014), Eyebeam (2013), the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund (2013 and 2011), The Watermill Center (2011), and the MacDowell Colony (2009). Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford, Connecticut and a mentor at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Making and Being, her forthcoming book about interdisciplinary collaboration, coauthored with Susan Jahoda, will be published later this fall.

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