WALTHAM, MASS.- The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University has announced its Spring 2015 exhibitions: Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler; New Acquisitions; Rose Projects 1C | Painting Blind; and Collection in Focus, on view February 11 – June 7, 2015. The current iteration of Rose Video featuring Gillian Wearing’s Bully will be on view through March 8.

PRETTY RAW: AFTER AND AROUND HELEN FRANKENTHALER
Lois Foster Gallery
February 11 – June 7, 2015
Pretty Raw takes work by the artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) as a lens through which to refocus our vision of modernist art over the past 50 years. In this version, decoration, humor, femininity and masculinity, the everyday, pleasure, and authorial control take center stage. Artists from the 1950s through the present work in a range of mediums, finding personal, social and political meaning in sheer, gorgeous materiality.

Selected artists: Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Dwight Ripley, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine, Al Leslie, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Sam Gilliam, Friedl Dzubas, Frank Bowling, Ralph Humphrey, Miriam Schapiro, Lynda Benglis, Harmony Hammond, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Carroll Dunham, Polly Apfelbaum, Dona Nelson, Marilyn Minter, Kara Walker, Kathy Butterly, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Mary Weatherford, Sterling Ruby, Ulrike Müller, Josh Faught.

NEW ACQUISITIONS
Gerald S. and Sandra Fineberg Gallery
February 11 – June 7, 2015
New Acquisitions gathers together objects that have entered the Rose's collection in the last 18 months. Major historical works by artists including Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam and Melvin Edwards demonstrate the Rose's commitment to diversifying its holdings in 20th century painting and sculpture by acquiring important works by figures who until recently have been excluded from canonical accounts of art history due to race and gender-based discrimination.  Curated by Rose Director Chris Bedford, this exhibition focuses on abstract painting and sculpture by African Americans with an emphasis on work made in the 1970s. 

ROSE PROJECTS 1C | PAINTING BLIND
Lower Rose Gallery
February 11 – June 7, 2015
Painting Blind brings together work by four artists–Willem de Kooning, Maria Lassnig, Frank Auerbach, and Georg Baselitz–that deliberately blurs touch and vision, bodily experience and image. A small group of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures reveal these artists rejecting the confines of categories such as abstraction and representation in order to feel their way to new possibilities in art in the post-war world. This exhibition, curated by Curator-at-Large Katy Siegel, is the final installment of Rose Projects 1, a series of three research-based exhibitions.

COLLECTION IN FOCUS
Mildred S. Lee Gallery
February 11 – June 7, 2015
The Collection in Focus series highlights and draws new connections among important and often understudied objects from the Rose’s renowned holdings. Curatorial Assistant Caitlin Julia Rubin will collaborate with artist Jennie C. Jones to select and present a number of works from the collection. The exhibition will include a recent work by Jones, who will visit Brandeis in February as part of the ART | BLACKNESS | DIASPORA series funded by the Brandeis Arts Council and presented by the Department of Fine Arts, African and Afro-American Studies, and the Rose Art Museum.

ROSE VIDEO 05 | GILLIAN WEARING: BULLY
Rose Video Gallery
On view through March 8, 2015
Photographer and video artist Gillian Wearing has described her working method as "editing life." Her work documents the disparities between public personas and private lives, using costumes, masks, and role-play to investigate the ways in which individuals present themselves to others when the self is temporarily concealed. Her powerful work Bully (2010) explores the psyche of the bullies we may have encountered (or been) and that of their victims.