Karen Brosius Karen Brosius, executive director of the Columbia Museum of Art, is in her second full fiscal year running everything on a $2.8 million budget at the corner of Hampton and Main Streets. For the year ending this past June 30, the CMA came out with an operating surplus. From now until 2008, the tenth anniversary of the CMA’s building, Brosius has a business plan with enough financial forecasting to always finish in the black.

Part of that plan is to fully utilize the building, to include the unoccupied spaces left over from what was a generous envelope in the former Macy’s, originally Davison’s Department Store in the early ’70s. A group of local portrait artists, calling themselves About Face, gather during the day on Mondays and in the evening on Tuesdays. About Face takes full advantage of the studio space Brosius carved out of the CMA’s basement level.

Karen Brosius in front of “Quay Road” by Sidney Guberman (American, 1988), a gift to the CMA from Lee Terry and Willis Mills. About Face is one of the CMA’s three affiliates, the other two being the Contemporaries and the Columbia Design League.

The Contemporaries is a subset of the membership, typically younger and more adventuresome socially – in other words, sometimes a singles’ mixer of the cosmopolitan cool.

The Columbia Design League sponsors a lecture series in the star system. Visiting luminaries in architecture and urban design, mostly, speak out in the CMA auditorium almost monthly.

Brosius and her board heartily encourage the affiliates, and maybe there’s room for one or two more. On the curatorial side, the selection of what should be seen in the galleries, Brosius sees an upcoming strategic curatorial plan authored by her new chief curator Dr. Todd Herman.

The curatorial plan can be expected to play on the CMA’s strengths, the areas Brosius and Herman can tout as well above the region’s other art museums.

In the area of scholarship, Brosius is coordinating with Dr. Charles R. (Randy) Mack of USC to publish a catalogue of the CMA’s Renaissance and Baroque paintings. The Kress Collection of 15C, 16C, and 17C paintings, given to the CMA maybe 50 years ago, is a high point of any visitor’s tour of the CMA. And it needs to be described and documented in one volume.

Brosius’s command of all this comes from her academic background in the fine arts and management experience in corporate America.

She was awarded a bachelor’s degree in music (cum laude) from Butler University in Indiana. Immediately after Butler, she gained full fluency in French as a Bryn Mawr student in Avignon, France.

Following studies at the Julliard School of Music (Lincoln Center, NYC) and the Ecoles d’arts américaines (Fontainebleau, France), she graduated Hunter College in NYC with a master’s in music history (summa cum laude).

Brosius came to Columbia from NYC, where she was director for media relations at Altria (formerly Phillip Morris). She also worked at the Pierpont Morgan Library and at Columbia University.

Brosius is particularly pleased with the CMA’s current exhibition titled, “A Body of Work: The Human Figure from Degas to Diebenkorn.” The exhibition features 70 works from the CMA’s collection and showcases figural work done primarily in the 20C. The artists include Edgar Degas, Marc Chagall, Larry Rivers, Henry Moore, Milton Avery, and other big guns in the art world of the last century.

The Contemporaries have a guided gallery talk on “Body of Work” scheduled for Wednesday evening, August 10, at six. An open tour is Saturday afternoon, August 13, at one with associate curator Beth Inman.

Carroll Heyward, last year’s board president at the CMA, recently cited Brosius as a “supremely competent leader and an excellent executive director.” All true. Besides, Heyward was smart enough to recruit her.