Annabeth Rosen | |
---|---|
Born | 1957 (age 66–67) Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
Alma mater | Cranbrook Academy of Art, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University |
Known for | Sculpture, ceramics, drawing |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, American Craft Council |
Website | Annabeth Rosen |
Annabeth Rosen (born 1957) is an American sculptor best known for abstract ceramic works, as well as drawings. [1] [2] She is considered part of a second generation of Bay Area ceramic artists after the California Clay Movement, who have challenged ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function and helped spur the medium's acceptance in mainstream contemporary sculpture. [3] [4] [5] Rosen's sculptures range from monumental to tabletop-sized, and emerge out of an accumulative bricolage process combining dozens or hundreds of fabricated parts and clay fragments and discards. [6] [7] [8] Reviewers characterize her art as deliberately raw, both muscular and unapologetic feminine, [9] [10] and highly abstract yet widely referential in its suggestions of humanoid, botanical, aquatic, artificial, even science-fictional qualities. [11] [12] Critic Kay Whitney wrote that her work is "visceral in its impact, violent even, but also sensual and evocative" and "floats between the poles of the comic and the mordant." [12]
Rosen has exhibited at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), [13] Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, [14] Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [15] Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, [16] and Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taipei). Her work belongs to the public collections of LACMA, [17] the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, [18] Philadelphia Museum of Art, [19] and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [20] among others. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, [21] Pew Artists fellowship, [22] Joan Mitchell Artists Award, [23] and United States Artists award. [24] Rosen is a professor of art at University of California, Davis. [25]
Rosen was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. [26] [27] She received a traditional education in ceramics at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (BFA, 1978), before enrolling in graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, 1981). [27] [25] [28] She began a teaching career in 1985, serving at institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, University of the Arts, and Bennington College. [27] [26] [25] [29] In 1997, she moved from the east coast to Davis, California to accept a position as the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis. [27] [25]
Rosen has been recognized through inclusion in several major ceramics surveys, including "The American Way" (Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 1993, traveling), [30] "Color and Fire: Defining Moments In Contemporary Ceramics," (LACMA, 2000), [31] "American Ceramics 1950-1990" (Kyoto Museum of Art, 2002), [16] "Bay Area Ceramic Sculptors: Second Generation" (Daum Museum, 2004), [5] "Overthrown: Clay Without Limits" (Denver Art Museum, 2010), [32] and "New Blue and White" (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2013). [33] She has received wider attention in her later career, most notably through a twenty-year survey including more than 120 sculptures and works on paper created over two decades, "Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped" (2017–9), that was mounted at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, [8] Cranbrook Art Museum, [34] and Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. [35]
Critics have described Rosen's work as conceptually complex, combining feminist concerns, humble materials and craft, decoration, labor-intensive processes, and a highly formal rigor. [11] [14] [36] They suggest that her idiosyncratic approach is both grounded in traditional ceramics training and knowledge and dedicated to challenging the norms of the medium. [7] [6] [37] Her work demonstrates the versatile and art-historical character of clay, recalling the Funk humor of Robert Arneson, the expressionism and scale of Peter Voulkos, and work by other ceramic innovators such as Viola Frey, Ken Price and Betty Woodman. [7] [38] [10] [39] Writers place equal weight on Rosen's postminimalist merging of formalism with emotion and intuitive gesture, which links her to sculptors Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Yayoi Kusama and Lynda Benglis, among others. [2] [11] [37]
Rosen's sculpture generally combines precariously balanced and structurally dense forms, packed gestural surfaces, and expressively applied glazes. [37] [11] Critics often note its disruption and displacement of perception, with shifts between detail and whole and micro- and macro-scales, which convey the psychological and symbolic through tactile qualities and figurative or architectural senses through physical presence. [40] [12] [11] She constructs her sculptures using a hands-on, accumulative process analogous to growth patterns that—atypically for ceramics—includes openness to chance, accident, technical "disasters" and ongoing experimentation; the process includes glazing, firing, wrapping or binding shards (with wire or elastic bands), re-firing and re-glazing, and combining wet and fired clay, among methods. [6] [37] [2]
Drawing also represents an important part of Rosen's practice. [1] [41] Her immersive, mostly ink, gouache and acrylic works often consist of entire surfaces covered with repeated, wave-like gestural marks. Like her clay pieces, they emphasize painterly gesture, accumulation, immediacy, and conceptual and formal experimentation, and according to Art in America critic Glenn Adamson, attest to the "importance of furious, iterative mark-making to her practice." [7] [37] [40] [2]
Rosen's work in the first half of her career reflected her traditional ceramics training and—particularly after the move to California—an interest in nature. [37] [2] It ranged from tall ceramic outdoor sculptures to slashing geometric black-ink drawings to thick, plate- and tile-based slabs that sprouted dense, vertical accumulations of modeled organic forms. [41] [2] [42] In the latter works, critics noted affinities with historical architectural ornamentation—della Robbia's terra-cotta plaques, decorative aspects of Gaudi and Louis Sullivan, or the swarming statuary of Hindu temples—as well as with geological cross-sections. [42] [38] [2] Sample (1999) is a representative piece, consisting of a roughly 10' by 16' grid of squares, dense with squirming, tentacular forms stacked in two layers and elevated on a steel stand. [38] [37] Maria Porges deemed the yellow-glazed work "a baroque, feminist-inflected riposte to Carl Andre’s dour modular floor pieces: nature’s fecundity riffing on the sometimes-humorless dryness of Minimalism." [2]
Rosen's show "Moving in Place" (2003) featured abstract, squatty agglomerations of forms suggesting emergent seedpods, gourds, fruit and human organs with surfaces of chalky white slip fired over deep-colored glazes (e.g., Chromus, 2000). [42] [10] Reviews compared the works' ghostliness to the white-powdered faces of classical Chinese theater, African face painting, or the aftermath of an unknown disaster. [42] [10] Writing about the stalky, bulbous work Cinctus I (2003), Ken Johnson likened it to an "ancient mold of spooky, moonlit antiquity [whose] weighty, slightly menacing muscularity" offered an exciting alternative to the typical refinement of ceramics. [10]
In the mid-2000s, Rosen turned to more loosely composed pieces she called "mash-ups" and "bundled constructions," which ranged from pedestal- (e.g., Squill, 2006–7) to human-sized. [40] [36] Reviewers noted the wide range of natural and cultural associations the sculptures conjured—scholars rocks and garden gnomes, barnacles proliferating on rocks, beehives, alien plants or ritual objects. [36] [1] [39] [6] The larger works typically consisted of numerous, individually modeled biomorphic elements, piled and bound together with wire or rubber strips and seemingly about to topple, which were held upright by tall metal armatures resting on casters, like wheel carts. [1] [43] [39] Their rounded, globular forms—alternately wormlike, bulbous, knobby, vegetal or organ-like—were often glazed in vivid shades of green and yellow, and in some cases intertwined with black and white tubular shapes in notably asymmetrical assemblages. [1] [2] [6]
Kenneth Baker wrote that pieces such as Bunny (2011)—a dense cluster of writhing forms capped by a tuberous yellow figure—exhibited "a pitch of comic grotesquerie" making them appropriate "emblems of a culture in which voiceless instinct expresses itself as excess—of accumulation, consumption, impulsiveness or power." [43] In 2014, David Cohen characterized such works as "monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity [with] sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elusive or ambivalent to characterize." [36] He and others likened their surprisingly animated human qualities, alternately, to Medusa, absurd Philip Guston works come to life, writhing souls in a scene from Dante, and "the sinewy contortions" of the Mannerist sculptor Giambologna. [36] [1] [39]
In the latter 2010s, Rosen began producing mound-like works resembling tilting haystacks, rocky cliffs or melting snowmen. [37] These included smaller pieces such as Boogaloo (2015)—a fired manganese purple and white ceramic mass with cracked glaze and a primordial look—and enormous works like Wave II (2017), an undulating white-and-black striped mass of bulbs and tubes that "reclined" on a steel armature and evoked both water in motion and a posed odalisque. [37] [7] [2] Rosen's exhibition, "Tie Me to the Mast" (P.P.O.W., 2017), included Bank and Parcel (2011–8), two six-foot-high towers composed of tubes, gourds, balls and blobs wired and piled on a wheeled dolly that Art in America called "hilarious in their pendulous anthropomorphism." [7]
Rosen has been awarded fellowships from the Pew Center (1992), [22] United States Artists (2016), [24] and John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2018). [21] She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1986), [44] Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1988), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2011) [23] and American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018), [45] and was elected into the American Craft Council College of Fellows in 2020. [26] She has been awarded artist residencies from The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and University of the Arts (Philadelphia). [46] [47] [24]
Rosen's work belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, [17] Philadelphia Museum of Art, [19] Crocker Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, [48] Denver Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, [49] Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, [18] Oakland Museum of California, [50] and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, [20] among others. [26] [24] [47]
Peter Voulkos was an American artist of Greek descent. He is known for his abstract expressionist ceramic sculptures, which crossed the traditional divide between ceramic crafts and fine art. He established the ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and at UC Berkeley.
John Balistreri is an American ceramic artist best known for his large-scale sculptures. He is currently a Professor of Art and the head of the ceramic art program at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA.
Richard E. DeVore, also written as Richard De Vore was an American ceramicist, professor. He was known for stoneware. He was faculty at Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Ceramics Department, from 1966 to 1978.
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator whose oeuvre spanned a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneering work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects. Instead she explored clay's potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts in a manner that places her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at University of California, Davis for nearly three decades.
Arnold Zimmerman (1954-2021), also known as Arnie Zimmerman, was an American sculptor and ceramic artist. His work ranged from monumental to miniature, and abstract to figurative, encompassing totemic vessel forms, tabletop sculpture and figures, murals, and room-size installations. He was part of a multi-decade, 20th-century shift in American ceramics during which artists challenged clay's identification with function and craft, engaging fine-art domains such as emotional expression, social commentary, figuration and narrative. Zimmerman first gained recognition in the 1980s for deeply carved, architectonic sculptures characterized by rough physicality, rhythmic surfaces, gestural presence and Italian Romanesque influences. In the mid-1990s, he shifted to figurative work that critic Donald Kuspit wrote, examined the interaction of finite man and infinite matter, artist and creative work: "There is a sense of futility and folly as well as seemingly senseless idealism and innocence built into Zimmerman's parables of the all-too-human."
Waylande Desantis Gregory was one of the most innovative and prolific American art-deco ceramics sculptors of the early 20th century. His groundbreaking techniques enabled him to create monumental ceramic sculpture, such as the Fountain of the Atoms and Light Dispelling Darkness, which had hitherto not been possible. He also developed revolutionary glazing and processing methods, and was a seminal figure in the studio glass movement.
Maija (Majlis) Grotell was an influential Finnish-American ceramic artist and educator. She is often described as the "Mother of American Ceramics."
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Sueharu Fukami is a Japanese ceramic artist and sculptor known for his work in pale-blue qinbai porcelain. Fukami's abstracted, sculptural ceramic works depart from the traditional Japanese artisan traditions of his upbringing and instead explore natural phenomena and universal senses like "infinite space" through sharp silhouettes, sweeping curves, architecturally-inspired arches, and delicately-colored glaze. His minimalist approach to porcelains has contributed to defining and expanding the meaning, importance, and popularity of contemporary Japanese ceramics beyond craft art circles, most notably to fine art collectors and museums globally.
Yō Akiyama is a Japanese ceramicist based in Kyoto. He was a late leading figure of Sōdeisha, an avant-garde ceramicist group that reimagined ceramics as nonfunctional sculptural practice. Akiyama studied directly under Kazuo Yagi, one of the founders of Sōdeisha, for six years. He later became a professor at Kyoto Municipal University of Arts and Music, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, having retired in 2018. As an artist, he works primarily with black pottery, a technique that fires clay in low temperature, smoky conditions to create a dark effect. His predominantly largescale work is richly textural and abstract, emphasizing the earthy materiality of the work as well as its form.
Matsuda Yuriko is a Japanese ceramic artist.
Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials, including clay. It may take varied forms, including artistic pottery, including tableware, tiles, figurines and other sculpture. As one of the plastic arts, ceramic art is a visual art. While some ceramics are considered fine art, such as pottery or sculpture, most are considered to be decorative, industrial or applied art objects. Ceramic art can be created by one person or by a group, in a pottery or a ceramic factory with a group designing and manufacturing the artware.
Donald Lester Reitz was an American ceramic artist, recognized for inspiring a reemergence of salt glaze pottery in United States. He was a teacher of ceramic art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962 until 1988. During this period, he adapted the pottery firing technique developed in the Middle Ages, which involved pouring salt into the pottery kiln during the firing stage. The method was taught in European ceramic art schools, but largely unknown in United States studio pottery.
Tip Toland is an American ceramic artist and teacher who was born in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. She earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado and an MFA in Ceramics from Montana State University. Her works, which are figurative and often described as "hyper-real," are held by galleries and museums around the United States.
Beth Katleman is an American artist known for porcelain assemblage sculpture cast from found objects. Her allegorical installations fall within the genre of pop surrealism, combining decorative elements, such as Rococo embellishments and 19th century Toile de Jouy wallpaper scenery, with satirical references to consumer culture, fairy tales and classic literature. Katleman's work is in private and institutional collections and is exhibited internationally, including an installation commissioned by architect Peter Marino for Christian Dior, in the Hong Kong and London flagship boutiques. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is the recipient of the 2011 Moët Hennessey Prize, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation grant, the Watershed Generation X Award, a Kohler Arts/Industry Fellowship and a residency in Cortona, Italy sponsored by the University of Georgia, Athens. Katleman holds a BA in English from Stanford University, an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and an MBA in Arts Management from UCLA.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Kazuo Yagi was a Japanese potter and ceramic artist best known for spearheading the introduction of nonfunctional ceramic vessels to the Japanese pottery world. With an innovative ceramicist as his father, Yagi was sent to art school to study sculpture, instead of pottery. After graduating in 1937, he continued to train in the progressive circles, such as the National Ceramic Research Institute and the Japan Ceramic Sculpture Association. Following a short period of military service in 1939 and through the early postwar years, he was involved in a series of collectives that sought to transcend the traditional aesthetic values in not just ceramics but also in a range of visual media.
Elise Siegel is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states. In the 1990s, she first gained recognition for garment-like constructions that blurred boundaries between clothing, skin and body, critiquing the roles fashion and plastic surgery play in the construction of sexual and cultural identity; writer Mira Schor included Siegel among the cohort of artists she dubbed "Generation 2.5" and credited for developing the tropes of feminist art. After shifting to clay as her primary material, Siegel was one of a number of artists in the 2000s whose work spurred a rebirth in figurative ceramics emphasizing emotional expression, social conditions, identity and narrative. Her ceramic work—which ranges from roughly modeled portrait busts to highly charged, theatrical installations—is said to capture fleeting moments of internal struggle, conflict and vulnerability, creating a psychological tension with the viewer.
Jun Nishida was a Japanese ceramicist. He is best known for his massive conceptual pottery pieces, which experiment with the material capacities of clay and the imaginative forms that ceramics could take amid the intense thermochemical conditions of the kiln. Throughout his brief yet productive career, Nishida pushed the boundaries of contemporary ceramics, challenging conventions of scale, abstraction, and method to produce a radically new visual language of pottery.