Art Fag City at Art In America: Rose Art Museum’s Meryl Rose Speaks Out Against Brandeis Claims

by Art Fag City on April 24, 2009 · 1 comment Events


The Rose Art Museum entrance

I spoke to Meryl Rose, a member of the Rose Art Museum’s Board of Overseers and a relative of the original museum founders for Art in America yesterday. I’ve provided a clip from the interview below, but I recommend reading the whole piece. Rose closes with a fairly significant statement about location of legal documents. [Background on the Rose Museum controversy here.]

ART IN AMERICA: What brought you to release the press statement issued today?

MERYL ROSE: We’ve been trying to fight what’s been going on as best we can. The administration and president of Brandeis keep changing the conversation; they call it different things, but they haven’t changed their original plan on January 26th.  So what we’re trying to do is to bring this to light, and to show people that the Rose is not in fact okay. It’s not going to remain a public art museum as it is now.  I don’t know what you call it but you couldn’t call it a public art museum. It’s not doing any of the things that a good museum does. There are things inherent to running a museum that Brandeis has completely stopped doing.

AiA: The press release indicates that $2.5 million in dues and donations have not been accepted since the time they released that statement.

MR: Approximately $500,000 is dues and donations raised by the board of overseers have completely stopped [being paid]. Michael Rush is a fabulous fundraiser and has done a great job for us. There was  a $2 million dollar gift, and the person who gave it is asking for it back — it was someone who had given a great deal in the past. I sit on the collection committees on the Board of Overseers. We had a meeting just a few weeks before the announcement on the 26th of January and we were excitedly discussing the next pieces [of art] we were planning to buy.  The board is invested in the art that we’re purchasing for the museum – we all planned to put money in [for the works] as we usually do when we buy art. All of that has stopped. We had an unveiling of a gorgeous triptych that was donated by one of our board members and two weeks later – “Oh! The museum is closing!” It’s really a horrific thing.

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