Maya Watanabe: Liminal / Into Form: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1957-2018

The Rose Art Museum has announced today that it will now be open year-round! The announcement coincides with the museum’s summer season, headlined by the first U.S. solo museum presentation of emerging Peruvian artist Maya Watanabe and Into Form, an exhibition featuring rarely seen works and recent additions to the Rose’s exceptional post-war and contemporary holdings. 

Maya Watanabe: Liminal
June 20, 2019—August 25, 2019

Informed by the historical and political context of her home country, Peru, Maya Watanabe (b. Lima, 1983) investigates the borders and limits of representation and the ambiguity that characterizes transitional and fluid states. In her first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Watanabe presents the North American premiere of her most recent work, Liminal (2019), which she filmed at the excavations of mass graves for victims of Peru’s two-decade-long internal armed conflict. A widespread and prolonged era of violence, the 1980s through the late 1990s were defined by atrocities perpetrated both by the insurgent guerrilla groups Sendero Luminoso (or, Shining Path) and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, and by military forces of the retaliating Peruvian government. 

In Liminal’s hour-long loop, Watanabe’s camera pans across terrain, tightly-framed and textured layers shifting in and out of focus. Gaining sharpness, elements emerge from this field of earth, roots, and rocks, becoming discernable as shards of bone, teeth, and the frayed edges of clothing. Archeological markers and measuring tools point towards their uncovering, though Watanabe’s images blur distinctions between these remains and the landscape within which they are set. While of the body, Watanabe portrays these elements in transition, a reflection of their liminal status. Awaiting forensic identification, they are remains on the threshold of subjecthood, suspended between the status of “missing person” and an officially declared death. 

Organized by Caitlin Julia Rubin, Assistant Curator.
Maya Watanabe: Liminal is made possible and supported by the Henry and Lois Foster Exhibition Fund.

Into Form: Selections from the Rose Collection, 1957—2018
June 20, 2019—January 5, 2020

Drawn from the museum’s exceptional postwar holdings, Into Form examines the ways in which artists from the late 1950s to the present have sought to break boundaries by questioning representation and notions of medium specificity. 

Since its inception, the Rose Art Museum has served, with prescience, as a platform and repository for the art and ideas of our time. Over almost six decades, the museum has collected works by artists, often early in their careers, who have transformed art practices in radical and diverse ways. While American art is a well-recognized strength of the Rose’s permanent collection, the international and multidisciplinary scope of the museum’s holdings—a testament to both curatorial zeal and the visionary donor base that has helped to establish the museum—is lesser known.

Into Form brings together 34 works, created by a multi-generational group of artists, which investigate hybridity and challenge rigid notions of representation. A tension between organic and geometric abstraction runs throughout the exhibition, showing long-standing concerns to connect artistic practice to the body and to natural phenomena, as well as a desire to distill forms to their most essential expression. 

The selection includes works on paper, painting, sculpture, and video, demonstrating the depth and breadth of the Rose’s permanent collection.

Permanent collection artists on view:
Anni Albers, Richard Anuskiewicz, Ralph Coburn, Haris Epaminonda, Sam Francis, Jenny Holzer, Tishan Hsu, Alex Hubbard, Jasper Johns, Julio Le Parc, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Dianna Molzan, Kenneth Noland, Joe Overstreet, Daniel Pflumm, Leon Polk Smith, Zilia Sanchez, Jesus Rafael Soto, Cy Twombly, and Pieter Vermeersch.

Organized by Luis A. Croquer, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator.
Into Form is made possible and supported by the Rose Exhibition Fund.

About the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University
The Rose Art Museum has been dedicated to exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art at Brandeis University since 1961. With its highly respected international collection of more than 9,000 objects, scholarly exhibitions, and multidisciplinary academic and public programs, the Rose affirms and advances the values of freedom of expression, global diversity, and social justice that are the hallmarks of Brandeis University. The museum is always free and open to the public, and is located 20 minutes from downtown Boston. 

The Rose Art Museum is opening Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm. For more information, visit www.brandeis.edu/rose/ or call T 781-736-3434.