Works By Betye Saar, Ralph Coburn, And Joe Overstreet Enter The Rose Art Museum's Permanent Collection

The Rose Art Museum has announced that three major works have newly entered the museum's permanent collection. The most recent acquisitions purchased with funds from museum endowments include Betye Saar's mixed media assemblage Supreme Quality (1998), Ralph Coburn's multi-part painting Random Sequence Participatory Composition (1962), and Joe Overstreet's monumental sculptural painting untitled (1972) from the Flight Patterns series. These important works add further depth to the Rose's outstanding modern and contemporary collection and join new and significant works by Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez and American artists Kay Rosen and Adam Pendleton that have been added to the permanent collection within the last two years.

Other recent notable purchases include pieces by Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda, who recently received the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, American emerging artist Martine Gutierrez, and Belgian artist Pieter Vermeersch, whose work enters a U.S. Museum's collection for the first time. Of the fifteen works added in 2019 alone, 67% were works by women and 53% were works by artists of color, in a group that includes multiple generations, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

Commenting on the recent acquisitions, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator Luis Croquer stated: "We are thrilled to welcome Betye Saar, Ralph Coburn, and Joe Overstreet's exceptional work to the Rose collection. These pieces add greater depth and new perspectives to our holdings, while contributing to diversify them with ideas, approaches, and experiences that make them more reflective and responsive to the world around us.

A pioneer of second-wave feminist and post­-war black aesthetics, Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles, CA) began a career in design before transitioning to assemblages and installations, for which she is best known. In 1972, she created her first series of assemblages, often depicting African American women in revolt against enslavement, segregation, and servitude. With the figure of an armed woman at its center, Supreme Quality is part of a series of assemblages built with salvaged washboards that the artist has collected for almost 60 years. Saar uses the outmoded household tool as a symbol of the unresolved legacy of slavery and the subsequent oppressive systems facing Black Americans today, particularly the plight of women. In her work, the washboard, a humble everyday object, speaks to both labor and historical trauma. Saar's boundary-pushing practice has now served as a major influence for many generations of artists that have followed in her footsteps.

Originally trained as an architect at MIT in the 1940s, Ralph Coburn (b. 1923, Minneapolis, MN; d. 2018, Miami, FL) worked outside the mainstream in Boston, exploring ideas of seriality, authorship, subjectivity, and participatory aesthetics. His graphic color-block paintings often derive from motifs in landscape or the urban environment. Many of Coburn's paintings feature three horizontal layers of color: a reference to his understanding of landscape as comprised of three distinct bands-land, sea, and sky. Random Sequence Participatory Composition is a major work from a 1962 series of multiple-part paintings meant to be rearranged in infinite ways.

Coburn described these paintings as "moveable architecture": multi-panel compositions that can be hung in different sequences according to the choice of the person responsible for the works' display. Coburn was a close and lifelong friend of Ellsworth Kelly, whom he first met at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and both sought to develop an aesthetic practice that might speak to variations present in the natural world and built environments. Coburn transmuted and distilled his own artistic vision in the early 1960s adopting open-endedness and interactivity. His pioneering approach to participatory systems precedes the adoption of similar strategies by artists in different continents in the ensuing decades.

"Not enough people know about Coburn's work, which is spare, beautiful, witty, and uncannily satisfying," wrote Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee. Random Sequence Participatory Composition is one of a few remaining and intact participatory compositions by Coburn.

For more information, visit www.brandeis.edu/rose/ or call 781-736-3434.

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