Barbara Rogers (b. 1937) is an American painter and art educator associated with mid-twentieth-century Photorealism and nature-inspired abstraction, and a retired professor of painting at the University of Arizona. She has worked in the media of encaustic, oil, acrylic, printmaking, photography, and collage. Rogers expresses themes about nature and the garden as a personal and symbolic Eden. Life, education and influences Barbara Rogers was born Barbara Joanne Wilson in 1937 in the small farming community of Newcomerstown, in northeastern Ohio. Her parents were Willis Adrian Wilson and Ethel Elizabeth Wilson. Her father worked in the machine industry, servicing and repairing Seeburg and Wurlitzer jukeboxes, slot machines, and cigarette and pinball machines. Her stylish mother designed and sewed clothes when Rogers was young, eventually opening Ethel Wilson's Fashions, a high-end women's fashions chain of stores. While her parents worked, Rogers was raised by her extended family of aunts, uncles, and grandparents. In rural Ohio, she learned about the symbiotic relationship between humankind and nature. Through her talented and industrious family, she learned about tools, skills, surviving, and prospering. Her great-uncle, Willis Adrian Tshudy, was a draftsman, carpenter, and pattern maker for a local machine manufacturing company. He taught her how to create and use hand-cut stencils, and her father taught her how to use an airbrush; both later became important techniques in her art. As a child, Rogers spent evenings listening to the radio while the women in the family worked on various handicraft projects, including quilts, braided rugs, and embroidery. Once her chores were done, she was given paper and pencils, which instilled a lifelong passion for drawing.
In 1943, Rogers and her family, including her sister Carol (born 1939), moved to Canton, Ohio, where Rogers attended West North Elementary School from the first through eighth grade. She then attended Timken Vocational High School, where she majored in commercial art. In 1955, she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to attend Ohio State University (OSU) as an art major, living with her aunt and uncle. Texas sculptor and visiting artist Margaret Adelle Stites became one of her earliest influences. In 1957, she took her first drawing class at OSU with Hoyt L. Sherman, who introduced her to kinesthetic drawing and “drawing by seeing” and became another important influence. Her professors, Manuel Barkan and Hoyt Sherman, were also important influences. On an art education field trip to Pittsburgh to see the Carnegie International exhibition, she encountered Willem de Kooning’s Montauk Highway (1958), and it reinforced her desire to become a painter. She graduated from OSU in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
San Francisco Bay Area, 1960–1963 In 1960, the day Rogers graduated from OSU, she married Alan Thomas Rogers, a fellow art student. Together, they traveled west to San Francisco, where Rogers took painting classes at the California School of Fine Arts (later, the San Francisco Art Institute). Her teachers included Frank Lobdell, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff, and she also became friends with classmate Carlos Villa. The current movement, Abstract Expressionism, and its focus on maleness both impressed and frustrated Rogers. To her instructors, Abstract Expressionism was a masculine endeavor because the gesture had to show boldness of force and have a sense of power and conviction. While such instruction gave Rogers artistic confidence, it also made her avoid subject matter and abstract gestures that could be considered feminine. To make a living as an artist, she had to define her art on her own terms and challenge the male-dominated system.
Facing adversity as one of the few women artists exhibiting in San Francisco art galleries, Rogers relied on professional friendships with other highly respected, yet marginalized Bay Area artists, including Raymond Saunders (artist). Robert Colescott, George Miyasaki, and Carlos Villa. Soon, however, Abstract Expressionism was giving way to the Bay Area Figurative movement, which fueled heated debate within art criticism and sparked a renewed interest in realism throughout the United States and beyond. In San Francisco, she developed her own photorealistic style that placed the figure in a utopian setting of tropical foliage, resonating with allegorical content. In 1961, Rogers was accepted into the graduate painting program of the University of California, Berkeley. Felix Ruvolo, her next-door neighbor on Hearst Street, was one of her influential professors, and ceramicist Jim Melchert and his wife, Mary Ann Melchert, lived across the street. Rogers studied art history with Herschel Chipp, printmaking with Karl Kasten, and drawing and painting with Erle Loran, Glenn Wessels, John Haley, and visiting artists Michael Goldberg (painter) and Angelo Ippolito.
From 1962 to 1963, Rogers taught art classes at Congregation Emanu-El, commuting by motorcycle with her husband Alan. There, she became interested in Judaism and its concept of choosing one's paradise on earth, which informed her life choices thereafter. During that time, she took a life-drawing class at California College of Arts and Crafts with Nathan Oliviera. She graduated in 1963 with a Master of Arts in Painting from UC Berkeley, where she was awarded the Eisner Prize in Painting. At the award ceremony, the dean told her that she would not get a teaching job because women would not be teaching college-level art in their lifetimes and told her to get good at selling her paintings instead.
New York City, 1963–1965 Using her Eisner Prize money, in 1963, Rogers and her husband traveled to New York City for the first time. She was hired as an art instructor at the Northport Public Schools on Long Island, and her husband was hired at Columbia University. They rented a house in Northport, one house away from novelist and poet Jack Kerouac and his mother. They also spent weekends visiting art museums in Manhattan, staying at the Chelsea Hotel, where she encountered Salvador Dalí and Arthur Miller. i She was also invited with her friend Priscilla Birge to tea by Bay Area art critic and art history professor Alfred Frankenstein, who was staying in the penthouse apartment with composer Virgil Thomson.
San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1989 In 1965, Rogers and her husband returned to California, where she accepted a position as an adjunct art lecturer in beginning drawing at UC Berkeley. The following year, her work was included in the Painting and Drawing Annual at the Richmond Art Center, and the Associate Faculty Exhibition at the Worth Rider Gallery, UC Berkeley. In 1967, she met Michael Walls, who was a student in one of her classes. A year later, he left the university to open a gallery in San Francisco and presented Rogers's first solo exhibition. During this time, Rogers began working with acrylic paints and the airbrush, a motorized tool used in commercial art that was gaining popularity with the rise of Photorealism and Pop Art. She reintroduced the figure in her paintings, already begun in her drawings.
In 1969, she and her husband Alan adopted a son, Christopher. The same year, she had a second solo show at Michael Walls Gallery. For the next two years, she spent her time being a mother, homemaker, and artist, while preparing for her first museum exhibition.Barbara Rogers, “Chronology,” in Marilyn Zeitlin, ed., Barbara Rogers: The Imperative of Beauty (Hudson Hills Press: Manchester, Vermont, 2012), 202. At that time, the San Francisco Bay Area was a hotbed of protests, violence, and riots. As a result, Rogers shifted her subject matter to images of the garden as a metaphorical place of control and serenity for her family. According to University of Arizoan professor Paul Eli Ivey, "Rogers abandoned herself in her garden imagery but was always in careful control over it. Her garden was Carl Jung’s jungle, a space for the unconscious to construct dream imagery, where a different set of laws operated.”Paul Eli Ivey, “The Emergence of the Airbrushed ‘Real Surreal’,” in Marilyn Zeitlin, ed., Barbara Rogers: The Imperative of Beauty (Hudson Hills Press: Manchester, Vermont, 2012), 35. She then created works featuring surreal images of composite beings in lush, jungle settings with glamorous figures, unlike other photorealists of the time, who focused on everyday life. Her main models, Renée and Nehemiah, represented a glamorous, liberated life of romance and exoticism.
In 1973, the San Francisco Art Institute Artist Committee, a group that represented the views and interests of Bay Area artists, invited Rogers to join the group. She was then appointed, along with Carlos Villa and Howard Fried, to select the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute Adaline Kent Award for a promising California artist, which included a one-person exhibition and a catalogue.John Gruen, “On Art: The Non-Objective Vision,” The Soho Weekly News, February 27, 1973. The committee chose Joan Broan, the first time that a woman had ever been selected for the award.
Also in 1973, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented a solo exhibition of Rogers's paintings, curated by Suzanne Foley. In these paintings, she arranged colorful birds, props, nudes, and costumed people in artificial jungle settings. Among her cast of characters and images were voyeuristic clowns; glamorous, jeweled females in broad-brimmed hats and turbans; handsome, top-hatted magicians; lush orchids; and tropical foliage, both real and imagined. Writer Charles Shere considered her work “strong and beautiful,” and that Rogers’ work showed how “wit and clarity can redeem the clichés of the psychedelic visionary realists, and how vision and intelligence can redeem those of the New Realists.”Hilton Kramer, “New Art of the 70's in Chicago,” The New York Times, July 14, 1975, p. 19. Charles Shere, “Women's Shows Booming, But No Exploitation Here,” Oakland Tribune, October 2, 1973, 39. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art also included Rogers in Twelve Painters of the Human Figure, curated by Paul Mills. A screen was placed in front of her painting, Three Nudes and a Samurai Bowsman (1972), warning parents that the painting contained male frontal nudity.Thomas Albright, “Painting with No Dominant School,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 1975, p. 43.
Rogers became a visiting faculty member in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974. That year, A. James Speyer, the curator of twentieth-century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, invited Rogers to participate in the Seventy-First American Exhibition.John Forwalter, The Chicago Herald, June 19, 1974. During the opening reception, she met painter Deborah Remington, and they became friends, and Remington as her mentor. Also in 1974, Rogers was included in Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture: An Exhibition, at the Krannert Art Museum, curated by James R. Shipley.Susan Efros, This Is Women's Work, Panjandrum Press, San Francisco, 1974. The following year, Rogers and her husband Alan sublet their apartment in Oakland and moved to Inverness, California, in Marin County. She rented a studio space from sculptor Theodore Odza and shortly after, she took a visiting faculty appointment at the School of Art, University of Washington. That year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purchased her painting, Nehemiah and Renée with Orchid (1975). She was also given another solo show at the Michael Walls Gallery, now at his new space in New York City, and her work was included in Images of Woman at the Linda Farris Gallery in Seattle.
In 1976, Rogers and her husband moved back to Oakland and then filed for a formal separation. The following year, she purchased the home they had been renting in Oakland, and