A breath and an echo

A small group of Rush’s colleagues, friends and supporters of the Broad Museum, including Rush’s husband, Hyun-Jae Pi, gathered in a rain-soaked tent Sunday to honor and remember Rush, who died March 27 of pancreatic cancer, little more than two years into his tenure as director.

Artist Margaret Evangeline, who showed her work at the Broad Museum in January 2014, found the most moving eulogy of the afternoon in Rush’s own words. She quoted from an essay Rush wrote about her installation at New York’s Drawing Center in 2000, “Confessions of Mlle. G.”

Evangeline’s dramatically lit mound of crushed paper, enshrined on a rustic, altarlike farm table, reminded Rush of works by great masters like Bernini, showing saints and martyrs at the moment “when breath had passed forever.”

To Rush, the folds of cloth in the old portraits, and Evangeline’s humble paper, revealed “the light and darkness that preceded the body and will survive it.”

In spite of the healing words, encomiums and reminiscences, there was no way the afternoon’s speakers could whitewash a cruel turn of fate.

In 2010, after a restless, truth-seeking life as Jesuit priest, psychologist, actor, art critic, teacher, author and museum director, Rush landed a dream spot as the founding director of a new contemporary art museum.

He dug into the job with relish, lubricating the confrontational edge of contemporary art with a unique mix of passion, persuasion and ruddy Irish vitality. Simon praised Rush’s capacity to charm people as he challenged them.

“He was a fearless pioneer and a Pied Piper, getting people to join him at the drop of a hat,” she said.

Simon drew laughs when she said Rush was “dauntless in his defense of art and an artist, even though most of the community didn’t think much about that artist.”

But Rush was fundamentally a teacher, “and that’s why he fit so well in a university setting,” Simon said.

Rush didn’t want the museum to retreat into the ivory (or, rather, stainless steel and concrete) tower of Zaha Hadid’s avant-garde architecture. He was uniquely suited to prod MSU and its environs into its discomfort zone.

Nathan Triplett, mayor of East Lansing, praised Rush for taking the Broad’s art across Grand River into the community with projects like Pakistani artist Imram Qureshi’s bloody blooms of paint in the alleys and streets and a crunchy “Land Grant” series of exhibits that showcased alternative agricultural models.

“It promoted conversation, dialogue and yes, sometimes conflict, but Michael knew that that was part of the role of this institution,” Triplett said.

Joseph Rosa, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, said Rush deserves mention alongside heavyweight museum directors like Alfred Barr, founding director of MOMA, Phillippe de Montebello, longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Nick Serota, current director of the Tate Museum.

Rosa said Rush earned a special esteem in the art world as embattled director of Brandeis University’s Rose Museum. When Brandeis decided to close the Rose Museum in 2009 and sell its collection to meet a budget shortfall, Rush led the opposition and lost his job as a result.

“Michael did a brave thing and changed the culture,” Rosa said. “He made noise and it was one of those rare moments in the art world where everybody comes together.”

The collection has still not been sold. In a taped tribute, the Broad Museum’s major donor, Eli Broad, said Rush’s pushback at Brandeis showed “great integrity” and turned out well in the end because it brought him to the Broad.

Jack Davis, chairman of the regional board of the Broad Art Museum, recalled Rush’s zeal to tie the history of art to the contemporary art world, as he did in comparing Evangeline’s paper to the cloth of Bernini.

Davis read a passage from German philosopher Michael Benjamin that Rush liked to quote: “Doesn’t a breath of air that pervaded earlier days caress us now as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of a now silent one?”