Last week, in a story I put up on the Time.com home page about the attempt by Brandeis to do whatever it’s trying to do to the Rose Art Museum, I mentioned that one reason why trashing the Rose was a terrible idea is that Brandeis has a significant art history program and the Rose is a major teaching resource for that program. What I didn’t have space to add is that one measure of how important the Brandeis program has been is that its graduates now occupy some prestigious jobs all around the art world.
Now three of those graduates — Kimerly Rorschach, director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Gary Tinterow, one of the chief curators at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum — have stepped up to protest the attack on the Rose. Their open letter is posted on the Rose website. It opens this way:
The Rose Art Museum stands in a wooded corner of Brandeis University, just off a road that winds up and around the campus. It’s a low-slung building, modest in scale-but for many Brandeis graduates like us who have gone on to careers in the arts, the Rose was the most significant educational experience we had.
You can read the rest of it here.