RoseAndCulturalProduction

=The Rose Art Museum and the Cultural Production MA Program= Mark Auslander Jan. 28, 2009

As director of the MA Program in Cultural Production, I have been asked to comment on the significance of the Rose Art Museum for the program's educational initiatives.

1.Theses supervised. Rose staff are not faculty member so do not directly supervise thesis projects. However, my colleagues and I routinely refer our graduate students and undergraduates to Michael and his colleagues, where they have to my knowledge always been guided and informally advised with deep integrity and responsibility. The staff has often made available for individual and small group student research projects works of art (including very rare DVDs) in its collection. Given that developments in contemporary art are so key to the understanding of many other domains in modern thought (from psychonalysis and critical theory to the history of science and gender/sexuality studies) I would be hard pressed to list all the departments and programs whose students have been served in this way, but this function has certainly been invaluable for students in Anthropology and Cultural Production.

2. Classes served. Robin Dash's "Looking with the Learner" class (about 15 students), in which students work closely with second graders from the Stanley School on how to teach creative encounters with art, takes place entirely in the Rose. Nancy Scott's wonderful Museum Studies class has been anchored in the Rose, in close collaboration with the curatorial and education staff, who are not instructors of record but serve, in effect, as co-instructors. We had been exploring a comparable course on Museum Education/Museums in the Community that similarly would have been based in the museum.

Speaking for myself, many of my classes have been welcomed by the Rose to do small research and observations projects during Opening events and on viewer encounters with art works. These include Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies (130-150 students), Museums and Public Memory (25), Cross Cultural Art and Aesthetics (20-45), African Art and Aesthetics (20-25), and Making Culture: Theory and Practice (graduate seminar of about 15, in which students often pay weekly visits to the museum and bring commentaries into class discussion and papers).

For the Community Engaged Learning classes I've been involved in, the Rose has been an important partner, as we have brought adults and youth from historically under-served communities (especially Latino and Afro-Caribbean immigrants) to engage withexhibtions in imaginative ways. (Last year, this was very helpful to students in Spanish language classes as well as the museums studies students).

My first semester here, my Culture and Power in Africa course(15) was even invited by the Rose to develop a well received class website in support of Coexistence, the important South African art exhibition curated by Pam Allara. The museum staff was tireless in assisting us on this.

Many of my classes and other Cultural Production courses do build intensive visits to the Rose (front stage and in the vaults) into the syllabus. These are hard to quantify; the impact of a single visit 'behind the scenes' in the presence of a gifted Rose staff person is often extraordinary and in my experience has led a number of my advisees to become deeply excited about museums and the art world.

I should also note that Michael Rush and his staff have offered invaluable critical feedback, at the most sophisticated level, on our course-based student curatorial projects, and that this has been a singificant recruitment tool for us in Cultural Production.

3. Internships. Yes, the museum provides superb internships for undergraduates and graduate students, in collections managements, registration, curatorship, education and development. My colleagues at the Smithsonian and the MFA routinely report back that Brandeis interns who come to them from the Rose are remarkably well prepared.

4. Other academic functions. Especially under Michael Rush's leadership, the Rose has hosted a series of first rate interdisciplinary academic symposia, closely integrated into their current exhibitions and their incomparable permanent collection.These have given our graduate students wonderful opportunities to present on their own research (often based on works in the collection) and to engage in dialogue with world class artists and scholars.

For instance, the week after next, on February 12 we are doing an interdisciplinary symposium on evolution and art in the Rose to mark Darwin Day, the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, with the artist Steve Miller among others; http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/darwin+art

Other recent well-received symposia and rountables in the Rose include:

Visualizing Science: Image-Making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/visualizing_science

Bricolage Revisited: A Roundable on Materiality and the Science of the Concrete http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/Bricolage_roundtable

Pedagogy of the Imagination http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/Pedagogy+of+Imagination

Channel Surfing: Collapsing Boundaries in Contemporary Art and Culture http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/Channel+Surfing

Hybrid Powers: the Recombinant Fiction of Octavia Butler http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/hybrid+powers

A roundtable on art and presidential politics: http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/Campaign+2008+Ads

and so on...

In these and many other academic forums the Rose staff have served as brilliant and exciting interlocutors, and worked hard to bring important artists into stimulating converstaions with faculty and students that cut across all divisions of human thought and practice. My colleagues who direct cultural studies programs around the country have often expressed deep envy that we have such a close working relationship with a university museum of this caliber. Our graduate students in Cultural Production are in a profound state of shock over this news; many have noted that they entered this program precisely because of its intimate linkage to the Rose. I cannot anticipate the precise impact on our recruitment plans (we are a revenue-generating program, after all) but there is little doubt that for those of us involved in Cultural Production, the loss of the museum and its collections would have profound implications for our recruitiment, research and teaching.