Brandeis seeks art curator … but not for Rose

Job is at president’s wife’s Women’s Studies Center




Brandeis University is looking for a “curator and arts coordinator” – not to restore the decimated staff at its Rose Art Museum, but for the Waltham school’s Women’s Studies Research Center founded and run by Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz’s wife Shula (pictured below).

The curator, a posting on the Brandeis website explains, “oversees the Visual Arts Program at the Women’s Studies Research Center by advising founding director on the overall strategy for development of the Arts program. Curates all exhibitions, from conception to completion, for the only activist/feminist, museum-quality art gallery in New England.”

The listing for the part-time job seems to have been posted on Oct. 29, the day following the opening of the exhibit “The Rose at Brandeis: Works from the Collection,” the only exhibit scheduled for the Rose this entire school year.

Shula Reinharz, a Brandeis sociology professor and also director of the school’s Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, is the high school sweetheart of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz. “In 2001, she opened the Women’s Studies Research Center in a 10,000 square foot facility that she designed and for which she raised all the funds,” according to a university biography of Mrs. Reinharz.

Meanwhile there is talk from university leaders of rebuilding the staff at the Rose, which used to number six or seven but has been reduced to two (or two and a half if you include an occasional financial person) because curatorial jobs went unfilled last year and then as part of Mr. Reinharz and other Brandeis leaders’ January threat to close the Rose and sell off its collection, the director and an administrator were pushed out, and another person left.

But so far there has been no public posting of Rose positions.

Selected previous coverage of the Rose crisis:
Dec. 23: Rose freezes curator search
Jan. 27: Update: Brandeis to close Rose, sell art
Jan. 29: Brandeis’s liquidator-in-chief
Feb. 5: Will defunct Rose replace defunct Safra Center plan?
March 16: Rose family objects to closing Rose museum
May 15: The end of the Rose?
July 27: Rose overseers sue to preserve museum, stop sale of art: If museum can’t be saved, they say give art to new Rose Preservation Fund.
Sept. 25: Brandeis president announces resignation.
Sept. 28: Brandeis’s Rose Museum: Where to go from here?.
Oct. 2: Administrative exodus from Brandeis.
Oct. 14: Brandeis agrees to not sell some Rose art: Attorneys disagree on what happened at hearing yesterday.
Oct. 16: Attorney General investigates Brandeis over Rose.
Oct. 28: Quiet protest at “Rose at Brandeis" opening: Cops attend too, while Brandeis board meets.
Nov. 1: Brandeis considers suing Harper’s Magazine (includes complete summary of our previous Rose crisis coverage).