I hope you will all be joining us next month for our 50th anniversary celebration events. When we gather in the Theater Gallery on Saturday evening, April 13, to honor Janet Langsam, Fred Wilson, and Lois Bregstein, surrounded by the site-specific painting, Threnody, we will be in one of the largest exhibitions spaces in the region.
Objects from Africa have been on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art since it opened to the public in 1974.
This is one of my favorite stories because it connects our campus to another great institution, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Another of the Neuberger’s great support organizations is the Museum Service Council. The MSC is comprised of devoted art lovers who have volunteered hours and hours of their time to the education of generations of students—from the College and from the community—who have walked through the doors of the Museum.
One the best things about the Neuberger Museum of Art are the people who make up our community. And among the ‘best of the best’ are the leaders who have, for so long now, been a part of our amazing support and advisory group, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.
Opening today, Cleve Gray’s Threnody is on view again as part of the Museum’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Today’s story is your story to tell.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Roy R. Neuberger’s 1969 founding promised gift. Twenty-nine objects were accessioned by the Neuberger Museum of Art in that year. Since then, the Museum’s collection has grown to comprise nearly 7,000 objects, which have been donated, promised, bequeathed, and purchased.
No, it’s not shiny, or fancy, or visible from the road. But that’s not what it was supposed to be.
The master plan for Purchase College was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s master plan for the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
In 2002, as Roy R. Neuberger turned 100, he published his second memoir, The Passionate Collector: Eighty Years in the World of Art. He dedicated the book “with great affection and respect to the extraordinary, original, passionate artists who have enriched my life beyond measure.”
Do you know which work of art was the very first to enter the Museum’s collection?
2024. A great year. Why? Because the Neuberger Museum of Art is celebrating its 50th anniversary!
A while back I wrote you about an experience I had when I was much younger, working as a curatorial assistant at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) and met with a donor who gave NMWA the plaster cast of Harriet Hosmer’s sculpture of the Clasped Hands of Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
Between your other festive holiday happenings, take a minute to mark your calendars for some of the special events that we’ll be hosting at the Museum during our Year of Celebration!
You’ve heard me mention that all year next year the Neuberger will be celebrating our 50th anniversary.
If you’ve been to the Museum lately, you’ve probably noticed that we are no longer charging for admission.
On behalf of all of us at the NEU, we wish you peaceful, restful and joyful times with family and friends during this season of thanks.
You’ve heard me mention that next year we’ll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Museum. This milestone wouldn’t be possible without the support of the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art. It’s true. We wouldn’t be one of the top academic art museums in the country without the Friends organization.
If you missed our exhibition, A Matter of Discovery: The Art of Luis Perelman, you missed a real treat.
Last week, a group of students from the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance visited the Museum with faculty member Nelly Van Bommel ’04 to experience Dennis Oppenheim: The Assembly Line.
If you’ve never been to Buffalo, you should go. (Wear layers.) Especially if you like the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the weekend, I had the great opportunity to visit the Darwin D. Martin House in a Buffalo suburb.
The first opera I ever saw was Verdi’s Nabucco at The Lyric in Baltimore, just about 30 years ago. Knowing little of opera at that time, I loved the pageantry of it from the start. And, then, as all of the opera-goers gathered during the intermission to sing Va, pensiero together, I thought, this is a magical and unifying experience.
Writing to you today, days after the attacks by Hamas on Israel, as the nature of the attacks emerge… the ruthless barbarism, the terror, the trauma… it’s very hard for me to put something into words here. It makes me angry. It makes my heart break.
This Friday, October 6, marks the 54th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the museum.
Are you an older adult? Some of you might be surprised to learn that you are. 55+. Yup.
It’s an exceptional experience to be with an artist who is seeing an exhibition of their work for the first time. I don’t mean a first exhibition of their work, generally. I mean an exhibition of a particular set of works of theirs that they are seeing on view for the first time.
It’s not easy to get a pin on that hat.
It’s finally that week again … the first week of the semester when all the students are back and the campus is re-energized.
Today was a bittersweet day. Our good friend Lucille Werlinich rotated off as chair of the Purchase College Foundation.
This will be more for those of you who followed the Tony’s…
Not long ago I visited the Rhode Island School of Design Museum for the first time. Wow. What a beautiful museum.
One of our greatest hopes for Hard Return has been the ability to involve so many students. And involve them we did! They had wonderful experiences … the kind of experiences that are distinctly PURCHASE and distinctly NEUBERGER.
Around here, Culture Shock means spring has ARRIVED at Purchase College … and it’s happening this weekend!
You’ve heard me talk about our performance art show, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment, and the opportunities that have been created for Purchase College students to be involved as performers and as production assistants.
Our highly skilled preparators move most of our art when needed, but sometimes we need backup, especially when an object requires rigging. Such was the case earlier this week when we needed to relocate Alexander Lieberman’s Alert.
A few of you asked about the Magic 8 Ball in the picture of the blocks that I shared last week.
So, in my office, I have a lot of blocks. These are blocks that my kids played with when they were younger but outgrew.
It’s sometimes hard to remember what our outdoor sculpture collection looks like when it snows, because it doesn’t really snow any more around here.
I’m taking a few days to be with my family during my youngest son’s Midwinter Recess.
Our performance art exhibition, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment, continues this week with a work by Purchase College Class of 1988 graduate Alix Pearlstein.
And now for a change of pace… My youngest has been really into dystopia as a genre lately, so over the weekend we went to the see a performance of The Machine Stops, a new play adapted by Kevin Ray from E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story of the same name.
We opened our performance art show, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment, today and I wanted to let you know about a special event later this week.
Built to last? Nope, not everything.
We’re building something. It’s big. Really big. It’s art. It makes noise. It’s been shown at the Neuberger twice before. It’s part of the collection.
2023 is off to a great start!
Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it has awarded the Neuberger Museum a $30,000 grant in support of our new performance art exhibition, Hard Return: 9 Experiments for this Moment.
Wishing everyone a peaceful and joyful New Year!
Want to know which museums in New York (aside from the Neuberger ... of course) look really great right now?
As I look back on 2022, the year is filled with reminders of the incredible support we have received from our visitors, members, and friends. You propel our creativity and make the Neuberger a place of rich learning and discovery.
No, not that kind of retirement….
Last week, students from the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance performed a wonderful improvisation event in the gallery with our Nicolás De Jesús exhibition.
If you’ve seen our YOKO ONO: Mend Piece (Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City version) exhibition, I think you’ll like this conversation with Midori Yoshimoto, an expert on Japanese women artists, and Diana Puglisi, our curator of education for youth and adult programs. Listen in as Yoshimoto describes her work with Yoko Ono and the evolution of Mend Piece since its debut in 1966.
My eldest son pokes fun at me for saying “the work” all the time.
Thank you to everyone who was able to join us on Saturday for the Friends 50th Big Birthday Celebration!
Tomorrow we’re moving one of our most awe-inspiring pieces back into the galleries. It was one of the first works commissioned specifically for the Neuberger. It was created here. It is huge. It is bold. It is powerful. And it is part of the Friends 50th Anniversary exhibition.
What is it?
After many thoughtful conversations about the academic needs of our students and the current COVID case load in our region, Purchase College decided to adjust its academic calendar to begin two weeks later than the originally planned start date.
So… what does it mean for the Museum?
I’m off this afternoon to spend some time with my son during the NYC schools break.
This morning we announced the addition of more than 30 new objects to the Neuberger’s permanent collection over the past year.
One of the most interesting things that is coming out of our remote work for the museum is the way in which it allows a new perspective, putting us in the position to think quite experimentally about what we do and how we do it.
Long ago, as a curatorial assistant at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), I received a phone call from someone who said they would like to bring something in to be seen. In those days, I met with a lot of artists who were interested in having their work shown at the NMWA, but this felt a little different.
Giving Thanks … to all of you, for all of your support for what we do here at the Neuberger.
For me, showing students how to look out beyond their own “backyards” is a key ingredient in teaching the value of understanding difference and of global citizenship.
Last week, I saw The Self-Portrait, From Schiele to Beckman at the Neue Galerie in New York City.
If Pettibone painted an image based on a reproduction of one of our Vasarelys, but upside down, should we exhibit it the way he painted it or should we hang his work upside down to match the Vasarely, which would also be hanging in the show.