About Us
The Rose was founded in 1961 and is housed in an international style building designed by Max Abramovitz of Harrison Abramovitz, the architects of Lincoln Center, New York. Abram Sachar, the founding President of Brandeis, writing in his memoir about his years at the University said of the Rose:
“The museum was dedicated in 1961 as part of a major community art festival. It is superbly situated on a rise, with its glass front resembling an illuminated picture after dark. The design is severe, but adaptable. A cantilevered stairway leads from the main, ground-level gallery to the lower level, where there is a decorative pool with a fountain. In the fortnight before examinations, the pool harvests hundreds of pennies thrown in by students as a good luck gesture.”
The Rose Art Museum is situated in the southwest portion of the University's 235-acre campus, almost at the property's edge. With a glass façade, the original Rose building is a classic white box with a distinctive atrium on the main level and the above mentioned reflecting pool on the lower level.
With its expanding program and art collection, the Rose inaugurated the Lois Foster Wing in 2001 (4,780 SF), designed by Graham Gund Architects, to provide additional gallery space to expand the contemporary art exhibition program.
The Rose Art Museum houses an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art, widely recognized as the finest such collection in New England. The collection is an unparalleled resource for Brandeis, the region, and, indeed, the entire history of art. Since its founding, the Rose has built a remarkable collection of international modern and contemporary art, originating from a series of prescient contemporary art exhibitions that introduced new art, artists, and ideas to the national arts and education communities. With more than 6,000 objects (paintings, sculptures, works on paper, new media) the Rose collection has particular strengths in American Modernism (Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Fritz Glarner), American Social Realism (Philip Evergood, Thomas Hart-Benton, Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Hyman Bloom, William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey) post-War American (Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Al Held, Alfred Jensen, Alex Katz, Morris Louis, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Lawrence Poons, Jim Dine, Keneth Noland, Philip Guston), Abstract Expressionism (Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb), Minimalism (Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Hannah Wilke, Jackie Ferrara), Surrealism (Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy) and Photorealism (James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Cottingham, Robert Bechtle, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings). Some more recent acquisitions include works by Nam June Paik, Anri Sala, William Kentridge, Thomas Demand and Matthew Barney. These names comprise a virtual “who’s who” of art since the 1960s. With its mission to "engage its communities in the experience of modern and contemporary art," the Rose maintains an active exhibition program, presenting new art while embracing its foundation in historical modern art.
The Rose was built initially to house a small group of artworks and the porcelain collection of the benefactors. Soon after opening, the museum’s first director, Sam Hunter, who came from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, initiated a vigorous and visionary collection campaign with a gift of $50,000 from Leon Mnuchin and his wife Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin. With his own keen eye and that of his friend the storied art dealer Leo Castelli and prominent New York collector Robert Scull, Hunter purchased twenty-three art works, twenty-two of which have become iconic in the annals of late twentieth century art, including paintings by Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, and Roy Lichtenstein.