Discover: Inside the NEU

As the first archivist hired at the Neuberger Museum of Art, I have spent the past four years sifting through the Museum’s institutional records to document our history. Many of the materials I have found have been featured in the backstories and exhibitions celebrating our fiftieth anniversary.

For Roy R. Neuberger’s fiftieth birthday, his wife, Marie, asked various artists to contribute a “page” to a book of greetings she was secretly assembling for him. Twenty-five years later, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, a second “Birthday Book” was compiled, this time including artists that are now represented in the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, artists who had exhibited at the Museum, and artists who were then teaching in the Visual Arts program at Purchase College.

At the Neuberger Museum of Art, we believe that creativity knows no age limit. Located centrally on the campus plaza at Purchase College, SUNY, we are celebrating fifty years of intergenerational learning with our mission to “Champion those who make art, those who engage with art, and those who discover meaning through art.”

The installation of Fluxus, etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection can be considered one of the first highly performative exhibitions hosted by the Neuberger Museum of Art.

The George and Edith Rickey Collection of Constructivist Art—much like the Hans Richter Bequest of Dada Art—is one of the five primary groups of art that represented the Museum’s collection during its inaugural exhibition in 1974. 

Just a few years before the Neuberger Museum of Art opened to the public, Hans Richter wrote and published his book, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, where the artist reflected on 50 years since the emergence of the Dada movement in the art world. At this time, the Neo-Dada art movement began making way, looking back at Dada for inspiration.

Like Richter and Neo-Dada artists, the museum is currently reflecting back on its own 50-year history.

As the Curator of Education, one of my core principles is to ask open-ended questions that elicit diverse responses to the artworks on view in the galleries. I felt it was fitting for me to start with a series of seemingly simple questions that I had while researching this moment, “Museum as Classroom.” What were classroom structures like in the 1970s and what did it mean for an art museum to be a classroom back then? What is the role of an art museum today as a community resource and nontraditional classroom space on a public college campus?

When does something — an object, an act, a situation— become “art”? It’s a question that’s really dependent on the artist — and even more so, the participant or viewer.

The Neuberger Museum of Art has always trained students in curatorial practice and the student-curated exhibition has long been a hallmark of that training. In this image gallery, you can see examples of brochure covers from more than fifty  student-curated shows exhibited in the Museum.

The Neuberger Museum of Art is an academic museum, meaning that while we function as a public-facing exhibiting and collecting institution, we are on the Purchase College, SUNY campus. That placement, both physically and conceptually, is a fundamental part of the museum’s identity.

In this session of Inside the NEU, listen in as Associate Curator of Education for Academic Programs Kristen Lindberg discusses the museum’s role as a center of teaching and learning for the Purchase College community.

With its 20 foot tall walls, the total volume of the Theater Gallery is over 98,000 ft.³.

The Museum Service Council, our cohort of Volunteer Museum Educators, tours around 2,200 visitors to the Neuberger Museum of Art each year. They are the reason our Adult Tours, NEU Kids Art Access Program, and School Field Trips happen and one of the reasons children get exceptional and unique art educational experiences that they would not otherwise have access to. They have been providing an invaluable resource to our community for 50 years and it is a true honor to be a part of honoring Lois for the Neuberger’s 50th anniversary.

The Neuberger Museum of Art’s Visitor Services Department has the honor of serving as the front line of interaction with the public and the Purchase College campus community. 

The Yaseen Lectures on the Fine Arts bring acclaimed scholars and artists to the Neuberger Museum of Art and Purchase College, SUNY to discuss their work and address contemporary ideas and issues. Since the lecture series began in 1974, prominent authors, artists, scientists, poets, composers, performance artists, activists, historians, critics, and scholars have discussed themes as distinctive as the speakers themselves. The topics are always pertinent to the moment.

The lectures are endowed by a gift from the late Helen and Leonard Yaseen, art collectors from Larchmont, New York, who were invested in modern and contemporary art scholarship. The Yaseens were inaugural members of the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art Board of Directors; they financed a similar lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The legacy of the Yaseens’s gift and its impact on our community continues today through the support of Roger Yaseen and his family in honor of his parents. The Yaseen Lectures on the Fine Arts Fund is stewarded by The New York Community Trust.

The wide and open flight of stairs that connects the Museum’s ground floor to the second-floor gallery is a signature feature viewable virtually upon entering the building.

While talking with our teacher partners I ask: what do your students need? Do they have art weekly? How can this museum experience be impactful in both your classroom and in their lives? 

Milton Avery’s Sunday Riders was the very first object to be accessioned into the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art. 

In the 1930s, at a time when most young men had put their lives on hold until they could straighten out their finances, Roy R. Neuberger married, had his first child, and made his first art acquisitions.

A special Inside the NEU–LIVE! event on Friday, May 15, 2020 featured a virtual Coffee Chat about the artist Agnes Denes, a primary figure among concept-based artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Art that pushes boundaries and raises important questions.”

During this session of Inside the NEU, Alex Gordon Curator of Art of the Americas Dr. Patrice Giasson and Engels the Artist revisit the Neuberger Museum’s Fall 2019 exhibition “Art Got Into Me”: The Work of Engels the Artist. 

There has always been a fine line or careful balance between an artist’s aesthetic and their personal biography. While many art historians either encourage or avoid psychoanalytic theory, artists such as Forrest Bess emphasized the importance of it in his work, and insisted that the painting and the personal could not be separated from one another.

This edition of Inside the NEU explores the life and work of British artist Henry Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986).  Best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures, Moore’s creations can be found as public works of art around the world.  One of the four casts of his Large Two Forms series is included in the Neuberger Museum of Art’s collection; the sculpture is located at the entrance to the Purchase College campus.

This week the Neuberger Museum of Art looks back to A Studio in the Gallery: The Playful Universe of Ignacio Iturria, a Fall 2017 retrospective of one of Uruguay’s most accomplished artists.

This edition of Inside the NEU explores the life and work of contemporary abstract artist José Parlá whose first solo museum exhibition in New York City, José Parlá: It’s Yours, is currently on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through January 10, 2021.

In May 2019, Lee Krasner: Living Color made its debut at the Barbican Centre in London. After stops in Frankfurt, Germany, and Bern, Switzerland, the exhibition – including the Neuberger Museum of Art’s own Burning Candles (1955) – has made its final stop at the Guggenheim Bilbao where it will be on view through January 10, 2021.

In this edition of NEU To Do, learn more about Lee Krasner, her pioneering work in Abstract Expressionism, and the Living Color exhibition.

During this Inside the NEU-LIVE! presentation on Wednesday, May 20th, Neuberger Museum of Art Chief Curator Helaine Posner introduced contemporary artist Lesley Dill’s work before live streaming We Are Animals of Language, a documentary by Ed Robbins (Pounding Glass Productions) that chronicles the making of Rush and other works on view in the Neuberger’s 2007 exhibition, Lesley Dill: Tremendous World.

This edition of Inside the NEU features items from the Neuberger Museum of Art’s archives about Louise Nevelson at Purchase: The Metal Sculptures, an extraordinary installation that was on view from May - September 1977 and was, arguably, the Museum’s first major exhibition.

This inaugural session of Inside the NEU features Museum director Tracy Fitzpatrick and provenance researcher Beth Silver discussing works in the museum’s permanent collection by the great American modernist Milton Avery. Listen as Tracy and Beth share the personal stories they’ve uncovered about Roy R. Neuberger’s interest in collecting this artist’s works.

Sit in on the conversation as Patrice Giasson, the Neuberger Museum’s Alex Gordon Curator of Art of the Americas, discusses Destination: Latin America, a five-part exhibition that takes a journey through twentieth- and twenty-first-century modern and contemporary Latin American art from the museum’s collection.