Annabeth Rosen (born 1957) is an American sculptor best known for abstract ceramic works, as well as drawings.Koplos, Janet. "Annabeth Rosen at Fleisher-Ollman," Art In America, December 2006.Porges, Maria. "Annabeth Rosen @ CJM," SquareCylinder, September 16, 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022. 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.Lauria, Jo. "Second Generation: Bay Area Artists," Ceramic Art and Perception, March 2005, p. 10–17.Brown, Glenn R. "Locus of a Disseminated Style," Kansas City Review, May 2004, p.54–5.Lauria, Jo. Bay Area Ceramic Sculptors Second Generation: Arthur González, Annabeth Rosen, Nancy Selvin, Stan Welsh, Sedalia, MO: Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. Retrieved May 9, 2022. 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.Porges, Maria. "Annabeth Rosen @ Paule Anglim," SquareCylinder, September 16, 2014. Retrieved May 6, 2022.Adamson, Glenn. "Annabeth Rosen," Art in America, May 2017. Retrieved May 6, 2022.Kron, Cat. Annabeth Rosen: Fired Broken, Gathered Heaped," Artforum, May 2017. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Reviewers characterize her art as deliberately raw, both muscular and unapologetic feminine,Heinrich, Will. "Women Win at the Art Show," The New York Times, February 27, 2019. Retrieved May 9, 2022.Johnson, Ken. "Annabeth Rosen," The New York Times, March 28, 2003. Retrieved May 9, 2022. and highly abstract yet widely referential in its suggestions of humanoid, botanical, aquatic, artificial, even science-fictional qualities.Whitney, Kay. "Annabeth Rosen: Five Conversational Fragments," Sculpture, March/April 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022.Whitney, Kay. "Annabeth Rosen: Fictions of Stability," Ceramics Monthly, March 2012. 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."
Rosen has exhibited at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),Lauria, Jo and Gretchen Adkins Color and Fire: Defining Moments in Studio Ceramics, 1950-2000, Los Angeles/New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Rizzoli International, 2000. Retrieved May 9, 2022. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston,Glentzer, Molly. "Ceramist Rosen's work evokes tragedy and humor," Houston Chronicle, August 25, 2017. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Annabeth Rosen: Fables, Exhibitions. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art,Kyoto Museum of Art. Contemporary American ceramics, 1950-1990: A Survey of American Objects and Vessels, Kyoto, Japan: Kyoto Museum of Art, 2002. Retrieved May 9, 2022. and Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taipei). Her work belongs to the public collections of LACMA,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Packed Tile, White, Annabeth Rosen, Collection. Retrieved May 6, 2022. the Museum of Fine Arts Boston,Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Annabeth Rosen, Objects. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Philadelphia Museum of Art,Philadelphia Museum of Art. Annabeth Rosen, Collection. Retrieved May 6, 2022. and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Untitled, Annabeth Rosen, Collections. Retrieved May 6, 2022. among others. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Annabeth Rosen, Fellow. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Pew Artists fellowship,The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Annabeth Rosen, 1992 Pew Fellow, People. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Joan Mitchell Artists Award,Joan Mitchell Foundation. Annabeth Rosen, Supported Artists. Retrieved May 6, 2022. and United States Artists award.United States Artists. Annabeth Rosen, Fellow. Retrieved May 6, 2022. Rosen is a professor of art at University of California, Davis.University of California, Davis. Annabeth Rosen, Faculty. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
Early life and career Rosen was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.American Craft Council. Annabeth Rosen, Recognition. Retrieved May 6, 2022.Miller, Robert Nagler. "The whimsical, profound ceramic art of Annabeth Rosen," The Jewish News, July 19, 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022. 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).Cranbrook Art Museum. "Cranbrook Academy of Art to Confer Distinguished Alumni Award on Annabeth Rosen," October 25, 2018. Retrieved May 9, 2022. 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.Desmarais, Charles. "Bay Area ceramics scene fired up in new ways," San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 2019. Retrieved May 9, 2022. 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.
Rosen has been recognized through inclusion in several major ceramics surveys, including "The American Way" (Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 1993, traveling),Aberystwyth Arts Centre. The American Way, Aberystwyth, Wales: University College of Wales, 1993. Retrieved May 9, 2022. "Color and Fire: Defining Moments In Contemporary Ceramics," (LACMA, 2000),White, Cheryl. "Color and Fire: Ceramic Echoes in LA," American Craft, December/January 2001. "American Ceramics 1950-1990" (Kyoto Museum of Art, 2002), "Bay Area Ceramic Sculptors: Second Generation" (Daum Museum, 2004), "Overthrown: Clay Without Limits" (Denver Art Museum, 2010),Lucchesi, Nick. "Marvelous Mud at the Denver Art Museum," Westword, June 13, 2011. and "New Blue and White" (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2013).McQuaid, Cate. "'New Blue and White' at the MFA," The Boston Globe, March 7, 2013. Retrieved May 9, 2022. 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, Cranbrook Art Museum,Scott, Ron. "Rosen & Binion @ Cranbrook Art Museum," Detroit Art Review, January 20, 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022. and Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.Marmer, Jake. "The Ceramics of Annabeth Rosen," Tablet, March 4, 2020. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
Work and reception
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.Cohen, David. "Annabeth Rosen at Ventana 244," Artcritical, June 12, 2014. Retrieved May 6, 2022. They suggest that her idiosyncratic approach is both grounded in traditional ceramics training and knowledge and dedicated to challenging the norms of the medium.Katz, Anita. "Annabeth Rosen's wild things at the Contemporary Jewish Museum," San Francisco Examiner, August 8, 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022. 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.Cheng, DeWitt. "At the CJM, 20 Years of Annabeth Rosen's Earthen Humor," KQED, October 9, 2019. Retrieved May 6, 2022.Cohen, David. "Gorgon Triffids on 22nd Street: Annabeth Rosen at Meulensteen," Artcritical, October 18, 2010. Retrieved May 6, 2022. 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.
Rosen's sculpture generally combines precariously balanced and structurally dense forms, packed gestural surfaces, and expressively applied glazes. 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.Brown, Glen R. "Annabeth Rosen: Between Drawing and Sculpture," Ceramics: Art & Perception, June 2008. 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.
Drawing also represents an important part of Rosen's practice.Hammel, Lisa. "Out of the Melting Pot, a Vast Diversity of Crafts," The New York Times, November 17, 1988. Retrieved May 9, 2022. 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."
Earlier work 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. 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.Princenthal, Nancy. "Annabeth Rosen," American Craft, June/July 2003. 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. 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. 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."
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). Reviews compared the works' ghostliness to the white-powdered faces of classical Chinese theater, African face painting, or the aftermath of an unknown disaster. 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.
"Mash-ups," "Bundled constructions" and "Mound" sculptures