ROSE ART MUSEUM’S BOARD ISSUES RESPONSE

As a rejoinder to a statement issued this week by Brandeis University provost Marty Wyngaarden Krauss, the Rose Art Museum board of overseers has issued a response. “While Brandeis University Provost Marty Krauss claims in an April 17, 2009, letter to the Brandeis board of trustees that the Rose Art Museum will remain a museum, the university continues to take steps to dismantle the beloved institution,” it states. “Despite the existence of the current board of overseers for the museum, Brandeis has named a new committee to explore future options for the Rose. In addition, the current position of museum director will be eliminated.”

Meryl Rose, a member of the Rose Art museum’s board of overseers and a relative of the museum’s founders notes in the response letter, “When the Rose family originally founded the Rose Art Museum, they were very clear about its mission and the integral role it would play as a part of the Brandeis community. . . . A museum with a collection and reputation such as the Rose needs a director, and while Krauss’s letter states that the collection will be cared for, it does not erase the fact that the Rose as we know it will cease to exist under the administration’s current plans. The administration is carrying out an elaborate charade, the first step of which is to turn the Rose from a true museum as its founders intended, into something quite different.”

Previous Artforum.com coverage of this story can be found here and here.