Kay Rosen (born 1943, Corpus Christi, TX) is an American painter. [1] Rosen's paintings are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. [2] Rosen lives in Gary, Indiana, and New York City. [1]
Rosen received her BA in Linguistics, Spanish, and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1965. [3] She attended graduate school in Linguistics and Spanish at Northwestern University, [3] and then taught Spanish at Indiana University in Gary. While she was teaching in Gary (Indiana), Rosen began taking studio art courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, [4] where she currently teaches.
Rosen's artwork is largely text-based, employing "formalism, linguistics, and humor to reveal content that is hidden within both the structural nature of written language and the ways in which meaning can be generated through the manipulation of text." [1] Rosen is interested in expressing language visually, and ss focuses primarily on wordplay. [5] Many of her works are representations of words in which certain letters have been juxtaposed or rendered in different colors or scales in order to reveal hidden messages or to draw attention to the relationship between language and meaning. [6] These features of Rosen's style, known as word art [7] can be seen in Untitled Grid [8] at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and in The Whitney Museum of American Art's Spare Parts. [9]
In some works, language becomes structure, "with words and letter-forms functioning as building blocks, and where, through unusual typographic arrangements, words and phrases can embody the thing they are describing". [1] Her precisionist-style works span in size from mural- to laptop-sized. [10] [11] Rosen's work frequently veers into commentary on the U.S. political condition, often deploying wit and humor. [12] [13]
In addition to works created for gallery spaces, Rosen is known for publicly presenting work in the form of outdoor murals. [14] The piece "Blurred" was exhibited along Interstate 70 as a part of the I-70 Sign Show. It was first located near Hatton, Missouri then moved to Warrenton, Missouri. The blurring of colors in text were interpreted as a statement related to political divides between Missouri's rural and urban populations. [15] Blurred (2004) [16] is currently in the collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Solo exhibitions of Rosen's work have been presented at the following museums and nonprofit art institutions: [17]
Rosen is the recipient of the following awards: [17]
Paul Pfeiffer is an American sculptor, photographer and video artist. Described by peer artist Gregory Volk as a clever manipulator of popular media, images and video technology, Pfeiffer is stated as one 'who excels at recasting well-known athletic and entertainment events with surprising open-ended nuances.'
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position at the Times.
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Lari George Pittman is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist who creates immersive installations. He has exhibited work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to MoMA, his work is in the public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kiasma, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Satterwhite has also served as a contributing director for the music video that accompanied Solange's 2019 visual album When I Get Home and directed a short film accompaniment to Perfume Genius's 2022 studio album Ugly Season.
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Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Cheryl Laemmle is an American contemporary surrealist painter of figures, animals, and imaginary landscapes.
Margaret Wharton (1943-2014) was an American artist, known for her sculptures of deconstructed chairs. She deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined everyday objects to make works of art that could be whimsical, witty or simply thought-provoking in reflecting her vision of the world.
Gala Porras-Kim is a Colombian-Korean-American contemporary interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work deals with the fields of linguistics, history, and conservation, often engaging in institutional critique.
Yamini Nayar is a visual artist working between New York and Delhi. Her work is part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Saatchi Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the US Department of State Art in Embassies collection.
Maya Stovall Dumas is an American conceptual artist and anthropologist. Stovall Dumas is best known for her use of ballet and public space in her art practice. She is associate professor, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Harold Persico Paris (1925–1979) was an American printmaker, sculptor and educator. He taught art classes at the University of California, Berkeley from 1963 until 1979.