Roger Mandle, Museum Director Who Helped Bring Art to Qatar, Dies at 79
From the Rhode Island School of Design to Doha, Mr. Mandle was a force in art and design for decades.
Roger Mandle in 2017. He majored in painting at college before turning to art history, and he went on to become a creator of museums.Credit.Brent Lestage
Published Jan. 19, 2021Updated Jan. 20, 2021
When the cellist Yo-Yo Ma needed a new headquarters for his Silk Road Project in 2005, Roger Mandle, then president of the Rhode Island School of Design, gave the organization a home on his campus.
When a member of Qatar’s royal family was looking to make her country into an art destination in 2008, Mr. Mandle took on the development of more than a dozen museums in Doha.
Clark Art Institute: Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Advance timed tickets required, clarkart.edu.
Norman Rockwell Museum: Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Advance timed tickets required, nrm.org.
Hancock Shaker Village: Closed
Williams College Museum of Art: Closed
BRTA: Closed; no buses running
Councils on Aging: Closed
Community Eco Power, formerly Covanta: Open regular hours
The Eagle: All offices open
Sometimes in the mid-1980s I took a trip to a then-unsung North Adams with a friend, and surprisingly discovered that its physical location was picturesque â mountains nestling it, and a river running like a ribbon through the town.
However, the old mill town also housed an immense abandoned factory whose striking buildings were left rotting. The center of the town was impoverished, with many of its stores closed; one of the few open bars was inhabited by aging alcoholics and other people who had seen better days. Much of the housing was wood frame and decaying, and the town faced a great deal of unemployment, a lack of revenue, decaying social services and population decline.
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If you want to make a documentary about a museum, MASS MoCA, the contemporary arts center in North Adams, Mass., is a pretty good bet in terms of subject matter.
The museum occupies a labyrinthine old mill complex that supplied fabrics to the Union Army during the Civil War and was transformed into an electronics plant in the 20th century. When the Sprague Electric Co. abandoned the town in the 1980s, Thomas Krens, then the director of the nearby Williams College Museum of Art, with his colleague Joseph Thompson, plotted to transform the behemoth 26-building site into a contemporary arts center called MASS MoCA.