New Rose Art Museum exhibit to celebrate art outside the frame

This summer Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum will launch a dynamic exhibit set to challenge, expand and redefine the boundaries of fine art. 

“Fabricated Imaginaries: Crafting Art” will be on view at the museum from Aug 20 until May 31, 2026. The exhibit will feature 40 works of art by over 30 international artists. Presented with thematic rotations, the exhibition seeks to challenge, expand and redefine the boundaries of fine art through the lens of craft, material innovation and multicultural affinities.

“Fabricated Imaginaries” presents artworks that inhabit a liminal space between disciplines, where visual art collides with craft traditions, design sensibilities and experimental modes of making. Drawn primarily from the Rose’s permanent collection and complemented by significant loans from private collections, this group exhibition highlights the tactile, the labor-intensive and the materially expressive as vital and subversive strategies of artmaking. Across media — textile, sculpture, installation, mixed media, video and more — the exhibition embraces and celebrates practices long marginalized in the canon of Western art history.

“‘Fabricated Imaginaries’ invites viewers to reexamine the divisions between fine art and applied art,” said Dr. Gannit Ankori, director and chief curator of the Rose Art Museum. “By highlighting the works of artists who traverse cultural, geographic and disciplinary boundaries, the exhibition celebrates the profound ingenuity embedded in craft, and its ability to convey complex narratives of representation, belonging, resistance and transformation.”

A highlight of the exhibition is the presentation of Korean American artist Jean Shin’s Alterations (1999), a vibrant cityscape assembled from hundreds of cylindrical forms created from the discarded cuffs of shortened pants and blue jeans. The artwork transforms cast-off material into a densely packed sculptural landscape that asks viewers to consider themes of labor, Asian stereotypes, consumption, the immigrant experience and nonbelonging, through a textile-based visual language.

Additional artists featured include El Anatsui, Zoë Buckman, Nick Cave, Judy Chicago, Jamal Cyrus, Jeffrey Gibson, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Yayoi Kusama, Ellen Lesperance, Al Loving, Dhambit Munuŋgurr, Yoko Ono, Veronica Ryan, Anne Samat, Sean Scully, Tuesday Smillie, Marie Watt, Yu-Wen Wu and many others.

Rose Art Museum is open Wednesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.