Tomorrow will prove to be a big day for Brandeis' visual arts community. The Rose Art Museum will open the doors of three new exhibitions, one of which is drawn almost entirely from the Rose's own collection, and the Women's Studies Research Center will premiere a show of photographs and lithographs drawn from one student's work in South Africa's AIDS orphanages.The WSRC, which held its first major art exhibition last semester with "Tiger By the Tail! Women Artists of India Transforming Culture," has two exhibits planned for the spring semester. "Healing, Community and Transformation: Student Visions from Johannesburg" features photographs by Ethics Center Student Fellow Naomi Safran-Hon '08 and linocut prints by students at art school in South Africa, where Safran-Hon conducted her fellowship in 2006.

The exhibition begins with three of Safran-Hon's photos of schools in South Africa. The color is the most prominent feature of these photographs; the squat, angular buildings and scrubby grass don't offer much warmth in these barren photographs. Despite the deep red walls and blue door of "Monde Primary School, Katlehong Township," the building looks forbidding and monolithic. There are no children dawdling in the yard with books and satchels. In an adjacent photograph, "Welamlambo Primary School, Tembisa Township," plain brick buildings sit side by side on a barren, dusty yard. Shadows of something like fenceposts creep from the bottom of the frame like hovering claws.

Safran-Hon's photographs of human subjects are only slightly warmer than her shots of the buildings. None of the photographs include human faces; according to a staff member at the WSRC involved in the exhibition, Safran-Hon wanted to protect the children and adults at the Art Therapy Center in South Africa by withholding their faces from the exhibition. As a result, many of the photographs feature dusty shoes, hands and school uniforms. One of these photographs, "Nyiko Primary School, Thembisa Township," is nonetheless quite charming. The dirty soles of the boys' shoes are glimpsed under a sheet of paper draped across their laps. The paper is decorated with handprints in brightly colored paint. The frame stops at the boys' necks. Decapitating one's subject can be an aggressive move in photography, but here the row of boys with their childish painting is a cute survey of shoes, hands and knees.

Two photos of adults stand out among the other six photos on the exhibition's long wall. One, "Artist Proof Studio, Busfactory, Newtown," features two men in hats with their backs to the viewer. It's unclear where they're sitting-the photo is closely cropped around their bodies. However, a wheel-like shape in the foreground and other vague machinery along with white-painted wood paneling in the background and one man's woolen sweater and bright yellow toboggan cap suggest a nautical New England tableau. It's quite a challenge to the viewer's expectations of what an image of Africa will look like. The yellow cap that Safran-Hon has captured in this photo is perhaps the warmest element in the show: the photographs struggle to capture the personalities or lives of her subjects in so closely cropping the frames around hands and feet to the exclusion of faces or even full torsos. Another remarkable photo of an adult in this grouping is "Monde School, Katlehong Township." This extremely dark photo features man in a yellow sweater contemplating a painting on the table before him. A Caravaggesque tongue of light enflames a cup of paintbrushes in front of the man, who sits with his hands clasped, head bowed and face barely intelligible in the darkness. It's not perhaps a very subtle metaphor but effective nonetheless.

The linocuts in the show are credited to the students of Stompie Selibe, from the Artist Proof Studio. The Artist Proof Studio is an art school in South Africa for students who normally wouldn't have the means to learn to make art. (Many of Safran-Hon's photographs are set at the Art Therapy Center, a separate institution.) The large-scale black and white lithographs feature common symbols of growth and community-blooming flowers, babies, reconciliatory gestures. The textures on the leaves, stems and fabrics in the linocuts are beautiful-geometric and stylized yet still very lifelike. Some of the angular points and triangles both in the shapes in the flowers and shading in "Ubuntu: Birth of the Future" evoke the traditional African patterns and prints with which we're all familiar. Another plant-themed linocut, "Tree of Life: Ubuntu," envisions human forms as the bark of a tree, reaching out with twig-arms, as well as the roots, reaching up through the soil to the base of the tree. The small, round heads and bodies lend a lot of warmth to a linocut in black and white (but mostly black). The roots of the trees, in contrast, are made up of attenuated figures, creating a pattern of strandlike arms and textured earth like softly geometric-patterned cloth.

Geometry is the chief focus of "Arp to Reinhardt: Rose Geometries." The exhibition features works from the Rose's modern and contemporary art collection. Curator Adelina Jedrzejczak wanted "to do an exhibition that looks at the permanent collection"-about 6,000 works-"in a more art historical way, to tell a story, in a way, of a section of the collection." Ellsworth Kelly's 1962 painting "Blue/White" inspired Jedrzejczak to put together a number of the Rose's geometric paintings. "I also thought it would look really fun. I think there's something exciting about doing shows that look fun," she said. The visual aspect is very important to Jedrzejczak; a museum show must look exciting in addition to following a cohesive theme. "I think it's important to look enticing," she said.

The show certainly does look wonderful. Along with "Blue/White," a painting that can roughly be described as two soft yet substantial blue forms gently meeting on a field of white, Leon Polk Smith's "George Washington Bridge #2" fills the museumgoer's view upon first entering the exhibition. "George Washington Bridge #2," a horizontal, curving band of orange on three white, circular canvases, has never been shown since the Rose acquired it. Other artists featured in the show include such big names as Josef Albers as well as, as to be expected, Jean Arp and Ad Reinhardt. The show's theme focuses on Arp's influence on later artists, who "created works in their own geometrical styles while utilizing observed reality as a stimulus," as the show's handout text reads.

"Brandeis started in 1948; the Rose opened its doors in 1961," Jedrzejczak said. "Both of these institutions were very in touch with what was happening at the time." The paintings were acquired either in the year they were made or shortly after, making the collection "more of a gamble and more flexible" because the curators who bought the art for the collection didn't have the luxury of knowing that these artists would go on to become some of the most well-known artists of their generation. Jedrzejczak went on to say that it's "kind of wonderful that the first curators [at the Rose] went into the studios of Rauschenberg and Motherwell" and other artists of their era to collect works for the Brandeis collection.

The show, which takes place in the not-large Herbert and Mildred Lee Gallery, leaves the viewer wanting more. This taste of the permanent collection begs the question: What other great modern works like "George Washington Bridge #2" are hidden away in the Rose's archives?

There will always be those who look at monochromatic paintings of squares and lines as pointless, easy or "not art." Perhaps Ellsworth Kelly's own words on the subject help explain the meaning behind this sort of art: "My work has always been about vision, the process of seeing. Each work of art is a fragment of a larger context. You don't read it as being on its own; the situation is open," he said. Jedrzejczak's focus on making the exhibition visually appealing will perhaps convert some skeptics who find themselves at the show, Jedrzejczak's first solo curatorial project. "It has to look just fun and organic to me," she said. "I start out with that visual aspect and see how it comes together.