University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum
That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's collection and then shutter the venerable Rose Art Museum. So unexpected was the announcement that the Rose's director Michael Rush didn't have a clue that it was coming when he was summoned to the office of provost Marty Krauss and given the news that in light of the university's increasing fiscal difficulties (its initial endowment has shrunk by an estimated 20-25%) the University would need to shutter the museum. "I didn't know anything about this," Rush is quoted as saying. Not incidentally at least one university trustees--and major Rose benfactor--was bankrupted by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scam, losing an estimated $145 million in personal wealth. These same benefactors are patrons of other cultural institutions as well, so there is almost certain to be a ripple effect.

What is particularly chilling, of course, is that the university's art institution and objects seemed to be the most expedient place the trustees looked to for quickly raising much needed funds. Jehuda Reinharz, the university's president, said, "The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it's a hidden jewel. It does not get a lot of foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice." Such pithy resignation bespeaks a serious breach of faith. Further comments suggsted that the university would now turn to fulfilling its "core academic mission." An academic mission bereft of art and culture is not a good harbinger for the future; don't build the audience and further even engage students, close the museum! The response from both those blind sided at Brandeis and those in the field has been loud, immediate, and appalled. Says Yale School of Art Dean and art historian Rob Storr, " This sets a terrible precedent. The Rose Art Museum has been known for four decades as a hospitable place to show serious and challenging art in an academic context. They are throwing away one of their prime assets." This certainly goes far beyond the proposed sale of individual pieces that other beleaguered institutions have attempted. Indeed the sale of one of the Rose's Warhols, Lichtensteins, or Johns would quickly close the budget gap...at least temporarily. This proposed closing constitutes a wholesale dismissal of the entire institution and its larger mission. As Rose director Rush points out in a recent interview (see second link below) the Rose itself is fiscally sound; indeed, aside from covering the expenses of the physical plant, i.e. heat and electric, the university does not even fund the museum. It is the university that is in a fiscal crisis, not the Rose. And so the university administration hopes to raid (and close) the museum as an answer to their own monetary problems.

Brandeis students are staging a sit-in at the museum today, a petition is circulating (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/in-opposiition-to-the-closing-of-the-rose-art-museum), and no doubt a court challenge looms on the horizon, given the level of outrage among donors, benefactors, and the public. But in the current climate this is no doubt yet another loud and clear wake up call to all institutions as they struggle with continuing dire economic forecasts and their relationships to their various constituencies.

You can read more about this debacle here:

Updates:
• Roberta Smith wrote an incisive article about the proposed Rose closing in todays (2/2/09) New York Times. Read it here:
• A Statement to the public from Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush:
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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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