After a month of uncertainty, the Rose Art Museum has officially reopened for student use, and I am pleased to admit that the experience remains largely unchanged save for a few conspicuous omissions. The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, and the general public is still barred from entry. Above all, the art on display is just as perplexing as it was last semester, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Aside from the mask requirement and the arrow stickers that now mark the path of the exhibitions, students are now required to register for a visitation time slot before being permitted into the museum. The online signup form is reminiscent of the coronavirus testing form, so it is very easy to use. Visitors are required, however, to display their Brandeis passport to the desk clerk upon entering. The museum does not have access to this information directly, so prospective visitors would do well to bookmark the Covid-19 portal on their phone if they haven’t already. I was informed that a yellow passport is acceptable, which means the daily health assessment is not required for entry (of course, you should always fill this assessment out before leaving your dorm). The staff are still getting used to the new check-in system, but the process is sure to smooth out in the coming weeks.
A few fresh pieces have been put on display, but many of the installations, including those in the Lois Foster Gallery (the massive hall in the back of the building), are largely unchanged from last semester. Unfortunately, the Dora García: Love with Obstacles exhibition has been altered considerably by the new regulations.
The large, white circles painted onto the floor of the exhibition hall were once occupied by live actors. The smaller circle would feature a woman, usually a paid student, reciting from a book of poetry. The larger circle would contain two individuals, a man and a woman as I once observed, that would simply stare at each other. The circles are empty now, and signage has been put up to indicate that the visitor is missing out. A projected film is still running on loop in the hall, but it is not exactly a pleasant space to sit and watch something.
The largest loss, especially for freshmen that have yet to experience it for themselves, is the closure of the Mark Dion room. The Mark Dion: The Undisciplined Collector exhibition is a small, wood paneled room at the top of the building’s back stair that features an array of vintage furniture and objects. Before the current situation, students were actually allowed to enter this space and touch whatever they wanted. One could sit down on the couch, grab an old book off the shelf, and pop a record into the player to simulate an authentic 60s living room experience (the staff would always politely ask me to turn the volume down).
Yes, the curators really did let you handle old records and a vintage record player without any direct supervision. Of all the study spaces on campus, the Mark Dion room was probably the coolest, most distracting and least appreciated. I asked one of the gallery attendants if the room might be opened in a few years, and she responded with uncertainty. The era of the free Mark Dion room may be at an end.
The Lee Gallery, the space that previously held the interactive exhibition INDEX: The Meeting, is in the process of being reworked. It will soon house the second iteration of the INDEX initiative, INDEX: Host, which will pertain to migration and climate change through the medium of film. I managed to steal a glance into the room, but nothing outwardly exciting is on display just yet.
Despite the closures, the Rose is still home to a variety of paintings, sculptures and artistic oddities, including a large wooden fence that blocks much of the basement floor, a hanging paper tapestry containing the brutal history of the 20th century and an ominously welded hunk of metal related to lynching. The sheer variety of perspectives and mediums on display in our museum is staggering, and I believe it is every student’s obligation to visit the place at least once before graduation. It is a stroke of great fortune that campus-going students have been allowed to return at all this semester, and I encourage everybody to make the most of it. In a world deprived of physical experiences, a visit to the Rose is sure to give those eyeballs of yours some respite from hours of screen fatigue.
