(Waltham, MA) – Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of The Rose Art Museum, has announced the Sam Hunter Emerging Artists Fund, designed to discover promising artists, and the acquisition of the fund’s first work, American painter David Schutter’s “MMA 636 a2.” 

The initiative is named after Sam Hunter, the Rose Art Museum’s founding director, whose keen insights and guiding principles continue to influence the path of the museum. In 1962, a $50,000 gift from Leon Mnuchin and Harriet Gevirtz-Mnuchin allowed Hunter to make a series of astute collecting decisions, acquiring works by rising figures in the art world—Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Ellsworth Kelly, and Marisol, among others—with a spending cap of $5,000 per object. Just as Brandeis established its academic reputation with incredible rapidity, Hunter ensured the same happened to the Rose through the acquisitions he made and the exhibitions he organized, and the status Rose enjoys today is in large part due to his vision in the 1960s. 

The Sam Hunter Emerging Artists Fund continues this legacy of smart and adventurous collecting at the Rose. In this spirit, an acquisition committee of leading national collectors, contemporary curators and practicing artists aims to select a work to add to the museum’s collection each year. The committee is tasked with identifying and exploring the work of promising artists who have not yet received widespread recognition but have the potential to become as great as the once “emerging artists” whose work sits at the heart of the Rose’s collection. As it was with Sam Hunter, the group operates with a spending cap, a limitation that encourages the acquisition of work by rising artists in the field. 

Upon the announcement, Bedford commented, “The committee is a fun, experimental exercise in institutional collecting. Committee members, each contributing a small sum to a collective pot, met monthly to discuss work by artists of interest, and eventually selected an artist who they believed to be the most promising of the group, and the best fit for the Rose collection. We are grateful to our committee members–Rena Conti, Kim Allen-Niesen, Leslie Aronzon, Manuel De Santaren, Tory Fair, Tony Ganz, Matthew Kozol, Liz Krupp, Dianne Markman, Betsy Pfau,Tim Phillips, Meryl Rose, Ann Tanenbaum, and Ruth Zachary.” 

Upon hearing of his work being chosen, Schutter said, "The collection of the Rose is an important station on any way to see great painting in the eastern U.S. With its history of collecting new work at the boundaries of the avant-garde, it is a perfect teaching collection not only to students at Brandeis, but to other museums and the general public. To be included in its collection, and its history, is an honor.”

ABOUT DAVID SCHUTTER 

David Schutter has had solo exhibitions at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Museumof Contemporary Art, Chicago; with Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. In his recent exhibition, “Rendition”, at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago, Schutter transposed a scale model of room 224 of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 19th Century painting wing, and rendered the four paintings it contains. His work was recently included in“The Way of the Shovel” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and in group exhibitions at The David Roberts Art Foundation, London, where his paintings after Jacob van Ruisdael’s “Haarlem” circa 1670 were hung in conversation with Gerhard Richter’s “Fuji”; the Glasgow International Biennial, in a segment curated by the painter Merlin James; and at Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble. 

David Schutter is the recipient of the 2015 Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy in Rome. The artist lives and works in Chicago. He teaches at the Department of Visual Arts of the University of Chicago.

ABOUT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY 

Founded in 1961, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is an educational and cultural institution dedicated to collecting, preserving and exhibiting the finest of modern and contemporary art. The programs of the Rose adhere to the overall mission of the university, embracing its values of academic excellence, social justice and freedom of expression. The museum’s permanent collection of postwar and contemporary art is unequalled in New England and is among the best at any university art museum in the United States. For more information, visit www.brandeis.edu/rose/.