Rutgers University is New Jersey’s primary state university
and is actually the eighth oldest university in the country, originally founded
privately as Queens College . With all the time I’ve spent at my parents’ house in
central New Jersey only about 15 miles away, I never managed to get onto the main
campus. This is despite making a fair number of trip to New Brunswick between
2005 and 2007 when I was teaching test prep classes for The Princeton Review. The
university’s original Queens College campus on the western edge of downtown New
Brunswick is only a small part of the whole, with several other campuses east
of town and north of the Raritan River in Highland Park. Like everything in New
Jersey, Rutgers sprawls over a great area of land. The historic core of Queens College, though,
is very pleasant to walk around and quite compact. It doesn’t have the feel of
a major public university because so much of the school is at the newer
campuses on the outskirts of town.

My primary reason to go to Rutgers, though, was Zimmerli Art
Museum on campus. I picked a fine cool day in late August, one of the first
pleasant and not overly hot days in what turned out to be an unusually hot August .
After doing a short walking tour of the campus I got to the museum entrance and
discovered……the Zimmerli Art Museum was closed for the month of August. How did
I miss that on the website?

Well, about three weeks later I returned on a pleasant Sunday
afternoon when I was able to get a parking spot on the street right in front of
the building without even having to feed the meter. The Zimmerli Art Museum
turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, somewhat larger than what I was
expecting and with one very unique and significant collection. The ZImmerli is
best known for its collection of Russian art from medieval icons through the
avant-garde. Most unique is the Dodge Collection, considered the largest
collection of Soviet Non-Conformist art in the world covering the late 1950s
through the perestroika 1980s.