Honoring Recent Gifts of Jeffrey L. Horrell ‘75 and Rodney F. Rose

By Curator of Exhibitions Jason E. Shaiman and Curatorial Intern Alexis Mramor 

The Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum (RCCAM) owes a debt of gratitude to Jeffrey L. Horrell ‘75 and Rodney F. Rose, whose generosity has helped to shape and enhance the museum’s collection and mission. Their most recent significant contributions have included 40 new acquisitions made in 2023-24, each selected with discernment and passion for art that resonates across time and style. Collections Manager and Registrar Jenn Laqualia curated an online collection to highlight these treasured works. Access this and other online collections and works via the collections page of our website at where visitors can explore nearly 5,500 of the more than 17,500 objects in our collection. 

Since 1992, Horrell and Rose have donated 52 works of art to the Museum. These include prints, paintings, and photographs by renowned artists such as Sam Francis, Nan Goldin, Jim Dine, Balcomb Greene, and Varujan Boghosian, among others. They also provided gift funds that contributed to the museum’s purchase of an important work by Kara Walker entitled African/American.

Their gifts greatly enhance and help expand the modernist collection of works at the museum, including women artists and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists. Many of their gifts have been displayed over the years, including iterations of the Art and Architecture History Capstone series by which students and faculty collaborate in curating exhibitions. The engagement of students delivers on Horrell and Rose’s intentions of donating to a university art museum. An exhibition opening in the Spring of 2025, Tooling Around with Jim Dine will also feature works from their most recent gifts, which are fitting additions to an existing collection of works by Jim Dine. 

Beyond their gifts of artworks, Horrell and Rose have secured additional lasting impact through their establishment of the endowed and named position of Director and Chief Curator and the creation of the Jeffrey L. Horrell ’75 and Rodney F. Rose Art Museum Fund. The endowed and named position ensures inspired leadership and thoughtful curation, and provides vital operational support for the Art Museum.

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“As a student intern, I had the privilege of contributing to the development of the exhibition, Collection Highlights: Recent Acquisitions, which prominently features a selection of the works donated by Horrell and Rose. Working directly with these pieces gave me a firsthand appreciation for the diversity of their contributions and an understanding of how collectors curate personal collections. While consisting mostly of mid-20th century works, Horrell and Rose’s donations also consist of early 21st-century works on paper.” 

Here are five exceptional works from their collection that are now part of the Collections Highlights: Recent Acquisitions exhibition with context provided by Jason Shaiman.

After founding a small artists colony in Giverny, William Blair Bruce became one of the first North Americans to adopt the principles of Impressionism. With the presence of Claude Monet in Normandy, Bruce favored intimate landscapes and lively brushwork. His rural landscapes and seascapes allowed his stylistic approach to move between Realism, Impressionism, and Tonalism. In this painting, Bruce utilizes overall neutral tones and soft blurred lines to create an atmosphere of mist. It is unknown which First Nations people are represented in this painting, though it should be noted that such subject matter was commonly depicted during this time.

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Drawn to the body in motion and its effect on the cloth surrounding, the American dancer Judith Brown was adept at depicting sculptural forms. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where she became a pioneer for abstract expressionist sculpture. Brown particularly focused on welding scrap metal often found in automobile junkyards into kinetic figures, animals, and the exploration of fabrics affected by air currents. She was well known for her ability to work with differing media and scale, creating small intimate works for indoor display as well as outdoor sculpture parks.

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Following his time as a student at the famed Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, Joseph Albers emigrated to the United States where he became one of the 20th century’s most important printmakers and educators. Albers became fascinated with the technical mastery of all mediums and abstraction, and is best known for his “Homage to the Square” series. His featured work explores the effects of perception and the apparent oscillation between flat surface design and an illusion of movement. Albers’ work aims to use equal quantities of four planes of color arranged in a nested geometric composition. The interaction of adjacent colors to produce effects of modulation and tonal variation create a sense of action.

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Best known for his innovative mobiles and stabiles, Alexander Calder was an acclaimed sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker, and designer. His work is renowned for its playfulness, sense of movement, and use of primary colors and organic shapes. During the 1930s, Calder became deeply dedicated to abstraction. Both his painted constructions and the brightly colored mobiles synthesized Constructivist methods and materials with abstract forms derived from Surrealist imagery. This untitled etching from his Paroles Peintes III Portfolio, reflects Calder’s signature style, featuring bold lines and vibrant shapes, capturing the essence of his sculptural work in a two-dimensional format.

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Richard Diebenkorn’s figurative and abstract works are dedicated to achieving a sense of balance between the creation of structure and its dissolution in light. In the 1960s, he began shifting from representational imagery to abstraction. X was created following Diebenkorn’s series of “Clubs and Spades” prints from the early 1980s, and may represent an extension of the series into increased abstraction. Abandoning the use of color and fully explored surfaces, his monochromatic approach to X is complemented by the interplay of positive and negative space. X illustrates Diebenkorn’s interest in exploring flattened space often associated with abstraction.

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