Brandeis Rose Art Museum to Close! WTF?

I just got this email from Brandeis. All I gotta say is WTF?

The global financial crisis and deepening national economic recession require Brandeis to formulate and execute decisive plans that will position the university to emerge stronger for the benefit of our students. To this end, our response to the crisis is to focus and sustain our core academic mission. I am writing to tell you that the Board of Trustees met today and voted to close the Rose Art Museum. The decision was difficult and was reached after a painstaking assessment of the university’s need to mobilize for the future and initiate a strategy to replenish our financial assets.

The Rose has been a marvelous addition to the Fine Arts program, and we are grateful to everyone who expressed their love for art and admiration for Brandeis’s academic mission by helping to create, build, and support the museum. Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university’s core teaching and research mission. Today’s decision will set in motion a long-term plan to sell the art collection and convert the professional art facility to a teaching, studio, and gallery space for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty.

Attached you will find the university’s public statement. I will be writing to the community shortly to update you on other initiatives currently under discussion by the faculty and the administration.

Sincerely,

Jehuda Reinharz

Let's do this together, in this year, to remember what we were not here to experience

As a part of the Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration, on his birthday (February 12), at 9:30 central time, you ought to read the Gettysburg Address. Out loud. Wherever you are. School children everywhere are doing it. So should you. Here is more information.

And in case you want to memorize it (or print it, or whatever), here is the text:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

for luck

"For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there. ... In those days, you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit's foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket."

-Hemingway, A Movable Feast, 91-96.

Great Space, Great Lakes

I don't know many folks in Ohio, but in case you're stopping through Cleveland, I'm lucky to have a project up at SPACElab, the project space for SPACES, an artist run non-profit thats been around for thirty (!) years. They've got some great other work up as well, and they are wonderful to work with (for anyone with a rogue project they're wanting to find a home for...).

The project is called, "Great Lakes, Great Memorials, Great Fears" and it looks to a post-War of 1812 treaty, the Rush-Bagot Treaty, disallowing big guns on ships in the great lakes. Ships were disassembled in Canada and the US and monuments were built to this little known piece of legislation.

In early 2001 construction began on the land where the US monument stands, retrofitting a women's state hospital into condos. The monument (and the building) were behind construction fencing and thus, noone could access the monument. Later that year, following the September 11th attacks, the US started rearming ships without addressing the treaty or notifying the Canadian armed forces.