Michael Rush, the founding director of MSU’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, will be remembered at a public service at 2:30 p.m., June 14, in the Sculpture Garden at the museum, 547 E. Circle Drive, East Lansing, Michigan.
Rush, also an award-winning curator, author and critic died March 27 after a courageous two-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
Rush began his tenure at MSU in 2010 and was instrumental in the completion of the visionary 46,000-square-foot contemporary art museum, which opened in November 2012.
He was key to establishing the museum’s dedication to exploring global contemporary culture and ideas through art and serving as both an educational resource for the campus community and a cultural hub for the mid-Michigan region.
Before coming to MSU, Rush served as the director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University near Boston, where he oversaw a significant collection of modern and contemporary art in the region and was widely recognized for his leadership during a controversial and successful effort to legally prevent the university from selling its collection and close the museum.
He previously served as founding director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and lectured internationally on art and museum practice. He had received awards from the International Association of Art Critics for his curatorial projects and was the co-founder of the Contemporary Art Museum Directors Association. In 2014 he was awarded The Charles A. Gliozzo International Award for Public Diplomacy from the MSU Office of International Studies and Programs.
Prior to his work in the art museum field, Rush was an experimental theater artist, founder of New Haven Artists’ Theater and was long associated with New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Early in his career, he was a Jesuit priest and psychologist, serving at Bellevue Hospital and on the faculty of psychiatry at New York University after receiving his doctorate from Harvard University in 1980.
Rush is survived by his spouse Hyun-Jae Pi and his siblings Mary Ann Rush Hertig, Joseph Peter Rush and Deborah Rush Cronkite.
Donations in Rush’s memory can be made to the Michael Rush Prize for Creative Exploration. Visit the Broad/MSU website broadmuseum.msu.edu/Michael-rush for more information and to RSVP for the service. Guests are asked to RSVP by June 5.