Over the course of this semester, many questions have emerged and have been left unanswered regarding the Rose Art Museum. What's going to happen to the current exhibitions? What's going to go up when they leave? How can I lay eyes on the Rose's permanent collection before it is shipped off to Christie's?The staff at the Rose may have been pondering the latter as well. According to Emily Mello, education director at the Rose, an exhibition is being planned to open this upcoming weekend featuring some of the Rose's hidden treasures. Mello says the Rose staff decided only in the past couple weeks to put together the show, which will go up in the Lee Gallery, where Prof. Joe Wardwell's (FA) "Master of Reality" show ran until this past weekend.

All three exhibitions currently up at the Rose-the other two are "Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950" and "Saints and Sinners," which features some works from the permanent collection along with several loans-were supposed to end at the beginning of April. However, the Hofmann Trust and the home institutions of the other loaned works allowed the Rose to extend the exhibitions through commencement. One of the paintings in "Master of Reality," however, was scheduled to appear in a show in New York and couldn't remain at the Rose. Said Mello, "The loans for all of the current exhibitions were slated to be returned after the shows were de-installed on April 5. We were granted permission to extend the exhibitions by nearly all of the lenders, but there were plans for some of the works in 'Master of Reality' to be exhibited in other shows in other venues. Since the show needed to be dismantled, rather than keeping the Lee Gallery empty for the rest of the semester, we thought, 'Let's take the opportunity to pull some works from the vault.'"

The lineup for this "best-of" show hasn't been fully decided yet, although Ellsworth Kelly's "Blue White," a focal point of last year's "Arp to Reinhardt: Rose Geometries," and pieces by Adolph Gottleib and Larry Poons have been confirmed.

"It's not a curated show. Curated shows take time and consideration and research. You don't just slap works of art up on the wall. We are considering what might be of interest to visitors from off and on campus and thinking about the richness of the collection you almost can't go wrong ... because the Rose has so many great works," Mello said.

Because the museum does not have a gallery dedicated to the permanent collection, museumgoers must wait for works from the Rose's vault to surface in the several curated shows the museum has traditionally held each year. In putting together the lineup for the upcoming permanent collection show, Mello said, "We've actually shown a lot of these works in recent years."

This new show, unofficially titled "Selections from the Collection," may incorporate some of the catalogues of those previous shows.

"I was thinking about how whenever we have artists or critics or people who come in [for events], they're really fascinated by our catalogs-they literally speak volumes about the first solo shows, [the] really important moments that have added to scholarship, that have been risk-taking and so . we've decided we're going to find a way in the gallery to show a history through the catalogs because they create a timeline," Mello said. "Everyone wants to learn more about [the Rose's history]. Visitors say, 'I didn't know you had a Dana Schutz show. I didn't know you had a Bruce Conner show,'" she said. "Actually the Rose had their first museum solo shows and many others."

Former Rose preparator Roger Kizik echoed Mello's sentiment. "As [the situation] has unfolded over the last month I find myself recalling the first museum shows that we have given to artists from the '60s through now, and there's a terrific record we can stand on. . From day one they were sort of on the tip of the spear for the most talented art of its time," he said, referring to the Rose's historic collection of abstract expressionist masterpieces, assembled by director Sam Hunter in the early 1960s from artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Many of the Rose's most illustrious (and most potentially lucrative) works were bought for prices in the low thousands from the artists themselves, before those artists' works could claim auction prices in the millions. (Pollock's No. 5, 1948 and de Kooning's Woman III sold in 2006 to David Geffen for $140 million and $138 million, respectively.)

Though no specific official announcements as to the future of the Rose as a public museum or as an education and studio space have been made, it is expected that the Rose will remain open to the public through commencement-this year, Sunday, May 17.