The Rose Art Museum has expanded into Waltham. Rosebud, the new satellite gallery of the museum, which sits on the corner of Moody and Main Street, is a gallery focused on the Rose’s growing video collection.

Chris Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster director of the museum, says that the expansion comes with the intent of broadening the Rose’s scope to become more of a museum for the Waltham community. “We imagine ourselves, increasingly, in the coming years, becoming more of a civic museum for Waltham,” said Bedford. 

But he says that the Rose is also looking ahead—hoping a familiarity with the institution will bring an increased flow of Waltham citizens to the museum on campus in the future. Bedford says that he hopes the Waltham community will gain a “familiarity with who the Rose is and what we do on the basis that we went to them — into their community — rather than asking them to come to us, three or four years from now.” 

The gallery will always exhibit a video installation, drawn either from the Rose’s collection or from students’ and professors’ works. It will also exhibit works in the front of the gallery, viewable from the street. 

There are no pieces currently on display, but Bedford says they will be open to proposals from University faculty, staff and students but also from Waltham community members. 

Bedford attributed the gallery’s focus on the medium of the video to the museum’s growing video collection. In recent years, the Rose has seen more video installations with Bedford’s Rose Video initiative — bringing a rotating flow of video art to the Rose Video Gallery. But Bedford also says he feels that the medium of the video is an ideal one for the Waltham public. “We collectively feel that the moving image has a particularly strong address to a broad constituency,” he said. 

Currently, William Kentridge’s “Tide Table” (2013) is on view—a work that portrays a stream of images through a sketched aesthetic. “I think the idea was to show the intensity of the formal inventiveness that takes place within video today through the lens of one of the medium’s foremost practitioners,” said Bedford when asked about how the video was selected. Bedford says that the videos may rotate more frequently than the exhibits at the Rose. 

As for the management of the gallery, all curatorial decisions will remain under the Rose’s jurisdiction, and Rose staff will rotate between the two galleries. The funding for the gallery was provided from the Sun Hill Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation to which Jennifer Combs, one of the board members of the museum, is connected. 

As for museum attendance, Bedford says that the museum seems to be faring well in the community. “Atmospherically, it seems to me that it’s been met with a really resounding vote of approval, particularly from the self-selecting interested arts public in Waltham who, I think, have been hungry for something like this and are grateful that something like the Rose was an institution that took up the challenge,” he said. 

The gallery is open select hours on Thursday through Saturday. “Tide Table” will be on view through November.