Jack Rasmussen

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Jack Rasmussen is the Director and Curator of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. A native of Seattle and raised in San Jose, Jack Rasmussen (b. 1949) earned his bachelor’s degree in art (1971) from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, before launching a long association with American University and notable arts career in the DC region. His several AU connections include master’s degrees in painting (1973), arts management (1983) and anthropology (1991), a PhD in anthropological linguistics (1994). In addition he also taught painting in 1975 and worked as the university’s associate director of development from 1983 to 1987.

After working in the Education Department of the National Gallery of Art, Rasmussen began his contemporary art career in 1975 as assistant director of the Washington Project for the Arts under founder Alice Denney. He then owned and operated the Jack Rasmussen Gallery, a vital part of DC’s art scene until he closed in 1983 to work at American University. From 1989 to 1992 Rasmussen launched and directed the Rockville Arts Place in suburban Maryland, anticipating a trend, now commonplace, of community-based arts organizations away from city centers.

Rasmussen then became executive director of the Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, a nonprofit contemporary arts center serving the Mid-Atlantic region. In his ten years at MAP, he curated a series of cutting-edge shows and off-site projects, introduced a new cabaret space and heightened community involvement. Rasmussen’s next post—before the Katzen—was executive director of the di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature, a contemporary art museum and natural habitat in Napa, California. There, he oversaw the care and exhibition of 2,100 artworks indoors and out, and organized traveling exhibitions to establish the di Rosa’s reputation and identity as the premiere venue for Northern California contemporary art. Rasmussen’s overview of the di Rosa, “The True Artist is an Amazing Luminous Fountain,” was shown and well-received at Washington’s Kreeger Museum in 2004.¹