Joan Rosenbaum (born in Hartford, Connecticut) [1] is an American curator and was the director of the Jewish Museum from 1981 her retirement in September 2011. [1] [2] [3] Rosenbaum is a speaker and panelist on art and Jewish culture related subjects. She also wrote and published articles for the Jewish Museum as well as other institutions. [1]
Rosenbaum was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Jewish parents. [1] [4] She studied art history at Boston University and Hunter College. [1] Later, she attended Columbia University, where she received a certificate in non-profit management. [1]
Rosenbaum received honorary doctorates from Denmark's Knighthood of the Order of the Dannebrog (1983), the Chevalier for Arts and Letters from the Cultural Ministry of France (1999), [1] and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2003). [5]
From 1965 to 1972, Rosenbaum held the position of curatorial assistant in drawing and prints at the Museum of Modern Art. [6] Following this role, she transitioned to become the director of the museum program at the New York State Council on the Arts, serving in that capacity until 1979. [4] [7] Afterward, she worked as a consultant at the Michael Washburn firm for a year. [1]
In 1981, Rosenbaum took on her most significant role as the director of the Jewish Museum, where she made notable contributions and accomplishments. [1] She curated numerous exhibitions during her tenure as director the Jewish Museum, including the following: [1]
She also curated exhibitions for individual artists, including Man Ray, Anni Albers, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Camille Pissarro, Louise Nevelson, Sarah Bernhardt, and Eva Hesse. [1]
As the museum's director, Rosenbaum accomplished several significant milestones. She successfully boosted the museum's attendance by one-third, attracting a larger audience to its exhibits and programs. [4] Under her guidance, the museum's collection expanded substantially, reaching a total of 26,000 objects. [8] Moreover, she played a crucial role in securing increased funding for the museum, significantly raising the annual budget from $1 million in 1981 to a $15 million. [8] Additionally, from 1990 to 1993, she spearheaded a project to renovate and expand the museum's building. Under her leadership, the museum underwent a significant transformation, doubling its size. [1] [4] During this time, she also successfully led the museum's first major capital campaign, raising an impressive $60 million for the project. [1] [4]
Alongside her involvement at the Jewish Museum, Rosenbaum played a role in a lobbying coalition in 1984 that advocated for a substantial increase in annual state aid to the arts, amounting to $11 million or a 28 percent raise.. [9]
Rosenbaum has demonstrated her commitment to the art and museum community through her active involvement in various organizations.
In 2000, she served as a board member of Creative Time, a nonprofit arts organization, and was involved in Creative Time and Artists Space: Anchorage 2000. [10] She also participated in the Creative Time and Artists Space: Red Velvet Committee in 2004. [11] The following year, she contributed as a member of the glow committee for Creative Time and Artists Space: Committee Content. These roles demonstrate her active engagement and support for these organizations, highlighting her commitment to the arts and her willingness to contribute her expertise and time to further their missions. [12]
Rosenbaum has also dedicated several years to the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Council of American Jewish Museums, actively participating and contributing to their missions. Additionally, she serves on the board of Artis, an independent nonprofit organization that supports contemporary artists from Israel. [13]
Rosenbaum is a speaker and panelist on art and Jewish culture related subjects. She has writte and published articles for the Jewish Museum, as well as other institutions. [1]
Kitty Carlisle Hart was an American stage and screen actress, singer, television personality and spokesperson for the arts. She was the leading lady in the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera (1935) and was a regular panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth (1956-1978). She served 20 years on the New York State Council on the Arts.
The Israel Museum is an art and archaeological museum in Jerusalem. It was established in 1965 as Israel's largest and foremost cultural institution, and one of the world’s leading encyclopaedic museums. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, adjacent to the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The first Jewish museum in the United States, as well as the oldest existing Jewish museum in the world, it contains the largest collection of art and Jewish culture excluding Israeli museums, more than 30,000 objects. While its collection was established in 1904 at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the museum did not open to the public until 1947 when Felix Warburg's widow sold the property to the Seminary. It focuses both on artifacts of Jewish history and on modern and contemporary art. The museum's collection exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, is supplemented by multiple temporary exhibitions each year.
Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Rebecca Alban Hoffberger is the Founder, Primary Curator, and Director Emeritus of the American Visionary Art Museum, America's official national museum for visionary art, located in Baltimore, Maryland.
Creative Time is a New York-based nonprofit arts organization. It was founded in 1974 to support the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged artworks in the public realm, particularly in vacant spaces of historical and architectural interest.
Debbie Millman is an American writer, educator, artist, curator, and designer who is best known as the host of the podcast Design Matters. She has authored six books and is the President Emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and chair, one of only five women to hold the position over 100 years. She co-founded the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City with Steven Heller. She was previously the editorial and creative director of Print magazine. Her illustrations have appeared in many major publications, including New York Magazine, Design Observer, and Fast Company and her artwork has been included in many museums and institutes including the Design Museum of Chicago and the Boston Biennale.
Patty Chang is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California. Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego. It wasn't until she moved to New York that she became involved with the performance art scene.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Claudia Gould is an art curator and the Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum in New York City.
Xenobia Bailey is an American fine artist, designer, Supernaturalist, cultural activist and fiber artist best known for her eclectic crochet African-inspired hats and her large scale crochet pieces and mandalas.
Claire Pentecost is an American artist, a writer, and Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, often focusing on nature and artificiality. Her work positions artistic practice as a research practice, advocating for the role of the amateur in the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of information. Her current projects focus on industrial and bioengineered agriculture, and the hidden costs of the global corporate food system.
Ann Philbin is an American museum director. Since 1999, she has been director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; before this she was the director of the Drawing Center in New York City.
Anne Pasternak is a curator and museum director. She is the current Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum.
Risë Wilson is a community organizer, activist, strategic planner, curriculum developer, non-profit consultant, and the current director of philanthropy at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, who lives and works in New York City. Founder of the Laundromat Project, she has been named one of the "worlds best emerging social entrepreneurs" in 2004. In 2015, she moderated the Creative Time Summit round table, entitled "My Brooklyn."
Ruby Lerner is an American arts executive. She ran Creative Capital, an arts foundation, from 1999 to 2016. Under her leadership, Creative Capital committed $40 million in financial and advisory support to 511 projects representing 642 artists. She stepped down from the organization in June 2016.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are a pair of artists that have been collaborating on video, sound, performance and installation projects since 2001. Several of their projects have been produced under the collective name neuroTransmitter. Their art works often incorporate popular music and examine how visual forms traverse and are complicated once they are at play in public spaces.
Jori Finkel is an American writer and editor who specializes in contemporary art. She is best known for analyzing the inner workings of the art market and for chronicling the Los Angeles art scene during its expansion at the beginning of the 21st century.
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor is a curator and art historian who was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Australia from 1999 until October 2021.
Jasmine Wahi is a South Asian American curator, educator, and activist. Her work focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In addition to running Project for Empty Space, in Newark, NJ and curating international shows independently, Wahi teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is currently the Holly Block Social Justice Curator of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Wahi is a former board member of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC).