Aaron Rose | |
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 Rose in 2008 | |
| Born | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | director, producer, writer, independent curator, artist |
| Years active | 1992–present |
Aaron Rose is an American film director, artist, exhibition curator and writer. Rose is known as the co-director of Beautiful Losers, a film that focuses on an art movement which includes artists such as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Steven "Espo" Powers, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine and Shepard Fairey. [1]
Rose grew up in Calabasas in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles and started attending punk and mod shows in the mid 1980s. The artwork of this scene inspired him to seek a career that facilitated creativity and artistic creation. From high school, he was accepted to Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, but dropped out after only one semester. Rose stated later "For me, art school seemed like a death sentence." [2]
Rose moved to New York City in 1989 and after a string of odd jobs, at the age of 21, he opened Alleged Gallery on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side. The gallery would go on to exhibit the works of many young artists from the art, skateboarding, graffiti and fashion worlds. As writer Carlo McCormick wrote in Zing Magazine in 2001, "What Alleged really accomplished was a profound understanding of the moment at hand. The ground zero of the zeitgeist where there is no substantive difference between any creative medium- and a way of translating and articulating this opaque ephemeral vernacular into a concrete visual language..." Alleged Gallery eventually grew to have branches in New York City and Tokyo. During this time Rose also held a job at MTV Networks producing and directing on-air promos. In 2005, he published Young Sleek and Full of Hell with Drago. [3] The book is based on the Alleged Gallery and the 1990s underground art scene in New York where he collected visuals and testimony from over 100 artists including Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, Thomas Campbell, Phil Frost, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Sonic Youth, Terry Richardson.
Rose was co-curator of the Beautiful Losers touring art exhibit, [4] and edited the collected art book [5] —released by Iconoclast and Distributed Art Publishers in 2004—featuring the work and artists of the tour. The exhibition toured the world through 2009. [6] He is also a director of the award-winning [7] feature documentary film Beautiful Losers, which premiered at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. The film was released theatrically in November, 2008.
In 2009, After the release of Beautiful Losers, Rose directed a short-form documentary called Become a Microscope - 90 Statements on Sister Corita, with original music by Money Mark and Becky Stark. The 22 minute film tells the story of Sister Mary Corita, the California nun who was also a political artist. In 2010 he completed "Portraits of Braddock", for IFC (Independent Film Channel). A television movie following the trials and tribulations of a small Pennsylvania steel town, and its young mayor, John Fetterman. [8] Rose also directed "Pendarvia", a short documentary on the musical group The Decemberists which was released January, 2011. In 2019 he directed a short documentary Hamburger Eyes which focuses on a tight-knit community of street photographers in San Francisco dedicated to capturing both the unseen and iconic moments of everyday life. He has also directed numerous short films and commercials for television. He is currently working on his first feature film.
In America, Rose is signed as a director with the Los Angeles production company The Directors Bureau which was founded by Roman Coppola and Mike Mills and also represents Wes Anderson, Melodie McDaniel, and Sofia Coppola. [9] He is also represented by Iconoclast in Germany. [10]
In 2009, he worked as a creative director at Wieden+Kennedy to help create WKE (WKEntertainment), a content-driven entertainment channel and production house. [11] At WKE, Rose was the producer of numerous television projects including Califunya, D.I.Y. America, and Don't Move Here, which he also directed.
Rose was an associate curator along with Roger Gastman and Jeffrey Deitch on the museum exhibition "Art in the Streets" which opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in April 2011. [12]
In early 2016, Rose co-founded The Conversation, a multi-media art space in Berlin along with curator/gallerist Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer. The project is a progressive gallery space, where concepts in all mediums can come to fruition through a diverse and talented international group of creative protagonists. [13] As an offshoot of this project, Rose established La Rosa Social Club. Conceived as a touring art bar, created by artists, and considered as a social sculpture, the project has been realized in Los Angeles, Sydney, Berlin and Abu Dhabi and continues tour the world. [14]
As a visual artist, Rose has exhibited internationally including Hope Gallery (Los Angeles), Postmasters (New York), Supreme (New York), Colette (Paris), and Dover Street Market (London). He is currently represented by Circleculture Gallery in Berlin. [15] His 2021 exhibition "Suitcase City" at The Lodge in Los Angeles saw the artist transform the gallery into a makeshift luggage store, where he created custom wallpaper and built displays from recycled retail fixtures he purchased from junkyards. In 2009 Rose was chosen to create a signature shoe model for DC Shoes based on his artwork. [16] He has also created clothing designs for Uniqlo, Nike, FACT and Shepard Fairey's Subliminal brand as well as other boutique apparel collaborations.
Rose is the co-founder of Make Something!!, a non-profit 501c3 art education program for teens. Each Make Something!! workshop is about teaching young people to use their own ingenuity and available resources to get something done. The program believes that creativity and self-expression are skills necessary in all factions of life and promotes a community of support to face challenges together. Working with a small team, the program has partnered with school districts in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Melbourne, Tokyo and Miami, now having held over fifty [17] creative workshops in cities worldwide,
In late 2011, Rose co-authored (with Brian Roettinger and Mandy Kahn) "Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century Identity Crisis," a book of criticism published by Swiss company JRP-Ringier. [18] Rose's essay for the book, titled "The Death of Subculture" has been described as an impassioned call to arms, urging the next generation of artists to end the collage era by adopting a philosophy of creative innovation. Rose's publishing imprint Alleged Press has released books featuring the art of Ari Marcopoulos, Ed Templeton, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, and Gusmano Cesaretti. [19] He is also co-editor of ANP Quarterly, a free arts magazine published by RVCA. [20]
Rose's journalism writings have been published in Index, i-D, Dazed and Confused, Self Service, L'Officiel Hommes, Kaleidoscope, Flash Art, and Purple where he is an editor at large. His numerous essays have been published in artist monographs and exhibition catalogs.
Leonard Hilton McGurr, known as Futura, and formerly known as Futura 2000, is an American graffiti artist.
Ed Templeton is an American professional skateboarder, contemporary artist, and photographer. He is the founder of the skateboard company, Toy Machine, a company that he continues to own and manage. He is based in Huntington Beach, California.
Wallace "Wally" Berman was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art.
The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.
Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, is an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California area in the late 1960s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, graffiti, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, impish, or a sarcastic comment.
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations.
Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.
Margaret Leisha Kilgallen was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement.
Corita Kent, born Frances Elizabeth Kent and also known as Sister Mary Corita Kent, was an American artist, designer and educator, and former religious sister. Key themes in her work included Christianity, and social justice. She was also a teacher at the Immaculate Heart College.
The Mission School is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s, centered in the Mission District, San Francisco, California.
Chris Johanson is an American painter and street artist. He is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement.
Beautiful Losers is a 2008 documentary filmed by director Aaron Rose and co-directed by Joshua Leonard. It was produced by Sidetrack Films in association with BlackLake Productions, and stars several artists including Harmony Korine and former graffiti artist Steve "ESPO" Powers.
Penny Slinger, sometimes Penelope Slinger, is a British-born American artist and author based in California. As an artist, she has worked in different mediums, including photography, film and sculpture. Her work has been described as being in the genres of surrealism and feminist surrealism. Her work explores the nature of the self, the feminine and the erotic.
The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is a contemporary art museum at New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand. The gallery receives core funding from the New Plymouth District Council. Govett-Brewster is recognised internationally for contemporary art.
WKE is an independently owned American production company and arts and culture delivery channel, a subsidiary of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The site contains material from a number of contributors, as well as original materials created by W+K under the creative direction of filmmaker Aaron Rose.
D.I.Y. America is a 2009 web video documentary series by director Aaron Rose which premiered on December 1, 2009, on Wieden+Kennedy Entertainment's website.
Cheryl Dunn is an American documentary filmmaker and photographer. She has made two feature films, Everybody Street (2013) and Moments Like This Never Last (2020). She has had three books of photographs published: Bicycle Gangs of New York (2005), Some Kinda Vocation (2007) and Festivals are Good (2015).
Make Something!! is an international series of creative workshops for teens founded by Aaron Rose and Stefani Relles. Since its inception in 2008, more than 2,000 high school students have taken part in Make Something!! workshops held in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Portland and Tokyo. Working with public school art programs and youth mentoring organizations, Make Something!! brings together professional artists and aspiring teenagers with the intention of teaching hands-on practical creative skills.
Deanna Templeton is an American artist working primarily in photography. She lives and works in Huntington Beach.
...the project was only a small slice of what Rose was brought into Wieden to do. His primary job is to help the agency develop an online media channel. The channel airs original content produced by W+K
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