Da n f o rt h M u s e u M o f a rt

foreword by Katherine French

essays by Pamela AllaraCatherine Mayes

rhoDa rosenbergMatrilineal Threads

c ov e r

Umbilicus, detail, 2009carborundum intaglio, chine collé, woodcut, monotype, linocut, printed paper, soft and hard ground etching, drypoint, 11 x 1650 inchesl e f t

Nate’s Glasses, 2010reduction woodcut, 68 x 98 inches a b ov e

Unlioc, 2008carborundum intaglio, chine collé plates 12 x 8 inches, 8 x 12 inches paper 20½ x 28 inches

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Close Knit

When Rhoda Rosenberg’s mother died in 2002, the artist missed her terribly. As a young girl she’d wanted distance from her close knit family, but as a grieving adult she craved the sound of their voices. The memory of nylon stockings falling around her mother’s ankles each summer was no longer an embarrassment, nor were oft repeated stories “boring or silly.” Instead Rosenberg came to view them as a kind of

“family thread,” connecting past and present.

But past and present extends far beyond family in Philadelphia. Much has been made of painters who studied at the Museum School prior to Rosenberg, male artists who shared an interest in figuration and trompe l’oeil. As a woman and a printmaker, Rosenberg does not initially fit into that line of succession – particularly given her embrace of abstraction, feminism and conceptual practice. Yet, like the painterly expressionists who share her alma mater, Rosenberg works from memory, not ob-servation. Essential meaning grows out of emotion.

For nearly a year after her mother’s death, Rosenberg wrote letters on strips of paper that were later glued end to end to create an artist’s book – a book that, like emotion, could be kept tightly coiled or loosened for public view. Edges of the book translated into abstract prints that reflect deep feeling. Using stretched, tangled, knotted and collapsing lines, she's able to express feelings of grief in visual terms while exploring objects as monumental symbols; objects more emotionally weighted than anything Pop artists might have been conceived. Instead of carefully rendering her mother’s legs or making them comically simplistic, she turns them into stabilizing columns. Bubbie’s handbag becomes almost too heavy to lift, filled with maternal wisdom in the form of notes scribbled with indigo blue pencil. Glasses worn by her brother Nate are a lens through which she views the world.

And the world she views has changed rapidly since her early days as a student. Sup-ported by waves of feminism that have ebbed and flowed throughout the second half of the 20th century, Rosenberg is very much part of family of women who’ve found their voice. Louise Bourgeois’ emotionally filled shapes, May Stevens’ incorporation of text, or Joan Snyder’s cherry trees shedding fruit – all resonate in a consideration of her work. Rosenberg’s artistic lineage may be complex, but it’s tightly knit, an absolute link to a wider understanding of her past and present.

foreword by Katherine French

As Director of the Danforth Museum of Art, Kath-erine French has curated numerous exhibitions and received awards for curatorial excellence, including recognition from the New England Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for work on the exhibition Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005. Under her direction, the Danforth Museum of Art has been named an Outstanding Cultural Organization by the Massachusetts Arts Education Collaborative.

Mom's Coil, 2007etching, chine colléplates 5 x 7 inches, 9 x 6 inchespaper 15 x 20 inches

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a b ov e

Dear Mom, Love Rhoda, 2004handwritten text journal, indigo, pencil, shellacked Kozo paper, 22 inch diameterr i g h t

Dear Rhoda, Dear Sylvia, 2008woodcut transferplate 31½ x 24 inchespaper 37½ x 29½ inchesCollection, Danforth Museum of Art

Dear Rhoda,

When I cleared out the piano bench and transferred things to another place, I came across these letters that I kept all these years. I’m so glad I kept them. Now, it’s your turn to keep and I’m sure you will treasure them.

All my love, Mom

Note to Rhoda Rosenberg from her mother Sylvia, dated Mother’s Day, 1992

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Matrilineal Descent: by spirals and Knotted Cords

“There’s a single thread stringing my Way together.” Confucius, Analects

The spiral is elemental. Found on petroglyphs from pre-historic peoples around the world, it is often considered a symbol of growth. Whether it appears to coil inward or to spin outward, the spiral is indicative of dynamic motion. It can be as delicate as a fern, as rigid as a nautilus shell or as churning as a nebula, but in all cases it is intrinsically tactile; examining a spiral in any form involves mentally tracing it with one’s finger. Perhaps both its implied motion and its tactility help account for the fact that it is one of the most basic of human-made marks.

Unlike the dynamic spiral, the knot is a blockage, an impediment to motion in the drawn line. When the radiating line of the spiral becomes entangled, the knot results. Energy is trapped, to be released only when the knot is loosened, and the line free to continue along its path. The prints in Rhoda Rosenberg: The Shape of Memory, are structured around a dialogue between these opposing linear patterns: the spiral and the knotted cord, the predominant elements in her work since 2006.

In Creative Credo (1920), Paul Klee wrote about taking a ‘little trip’ with a line, see-ing in its changing configuration and direction a narrative to be constructed in the viewer’s imagination. Rhoda Rosenberg also constructs narratives with lines, both with her printmaking tools and with the various papers integrated into her prints via chine collé. While her use of hatched lines to create elemental shapes has been a constant in her work for many years, the spiral ‘narrative’ became a primary motif with a print My Mother’s Legs (1991). The small print consists of two columnar uprights, each ringed with coils representing the sagging socks that used to embar-rass Rosenberg as a teenager. As she wrote after she created the image: “I want to make a physical shape have an emotional experience…I am beginning to understand how my art is my teacher. It has helped me learn about myself. I’ve learned that no matter how trivial or painful my memories are they can be marvelous resources for my work. I’ve learned that what might appear to be the most insignificant is often the most powerful.”1

After her mother’s death in 2002, the spiral became a memorial in the form of a tightly wound scroll, Dear Mom, Love Rhoda (2004), a journal of her memories of her mother written daily over the course of a year, the Jewish period of mourning. Inscribed with indigo ink on narrow, two-inch high strips of paper, glued together and turned in on itself so that its contents remain inaccessible, it is a winding sheet securely binding the body of their relationship. Rosenberg had long, “healing conver-sations” with her mother in the years before she died, so an adult bond was formed that is rare among mothers and their female children.2 The resulting diary is a sculp-tural monument not to a life made public, (in this our Facebook era), but to a rela-

essay byPamela Allara

This essay was written on the occasion of the ex-hibition, Rhoda Rosenberg: Shapes of Memory, at the Danforth Museum of Art, November 14, 2010-February 6, 2011

Now Associate Professor Emerita of Contempo-rary and Visual Culture at Brandeis University, Pa-mela Allara has served as guest curator for numer-ous museums and college art galleries. In 2003, she co-organized the exhibition, Co-existence: Con-temporary Cultural Production in South Africa for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. She is notably author of a monograph on the American painter Alice Neel, Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery, 1998/2000.

Journal, detail, 2006woodcut with handwritten text32 x 31 inches

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When one enters the Rhoda’s home-studio in rural Merrimac, Massachusetts, one passes a grand piano on which are arranged framed photographs of her parents, Sylvia and Sam, her brother Nate, and herself as a child. The piano belonged to her parents,7 who filled their home with music of all kinds. Upstairs, in her mother’s former bedroom, as if in a literal visualization of a family tree, are older photographs of her parents and grandparents: the ‘ancestors’. Prominent among them is her grand-mother, Rebecca (Bubbie), with whom Rhoda shared a bed until she was eight, when the family moved to larger quarters. These photographs are memento mori triggering memories and emotions that the artist carries into her studio at the side of her home.

With the advent of DNA testing, a cultural phenomenon has emerged that is perhaps a reaction to the falling away of outmoded markers of identity such as nationality or race. Increasingly people obsessively research their genealogy in order to unearth information about relatives they have never met, or skim over centuries in an effort to fix the cocktail of their ethnic mix as revealed by their genes. Both are a quest for a stable identity in an era of collapsed ideologies. At first blush, Rosenberg’s work might appear to be part of this trend; however, it is concerned instead with immedi-ate family history, with all of its complications, rather than with appropriating the history of strangers in order to construct a self. “Hi, Mom…Do you know me?” she asks in Hi, Mom from 2008. The question is both personal and universal: do moth-ers ever really know their children? Rosenberg’s work is as much about that which is hidden or forgotten as it is about information gleaned from historical or genetic research. As such, hers is a genuine family history, a product of factual occurrences, as remembered, re-imagined and re-experienced. Her art is about self-knowledge, or rather, an understanding of ‘self’ that is sustained by the burdensome or gossamer threads of memory that uncoil, break and reform across a lifetime. As she has written:

“Memory. It comes in a flash. Sometimes when least expected: driving home, washing dishes, walking or even when you’re supposed to be concentrating on something else.”8 Memory also vanishes in a flash, but in her work Rosenberg sustains it and meditates on its import.

In a series of artist’s books she exhibited in Boston in 1993, Rosenberg incorporated family photographs into her work for the first time, poignantly but without senti-mentality charting her relations with her parents from adolescence to adulthood. That she should turn to the subject of her family at that time is not surprising, as her mother had recently come to live with her, and Rosenberg was supporting her mother, her husband and her son through part-time teaching at two Boston-area art schools. Her exhausting schedule and the stress of the heavy responsibilities at home led her to appreciate all that her immigrant parents had achieved. (She com-ments with pride still today about her father’s stamina, as a butcher who was often on his feet for over 18 hours a day during the High Holidays). After her mother and grandmother had both died, she discovered a group of letters between them that she had been given but had forgotten about. She was determined to enter into the spirit of their correspondence by copying them with the same fine pen she was using

tionship honored and memorialized by retaining, indeed insisting upon, its privacy.3 The prints in this exhibition have unrolled from that therapeutic, handwritten scroll.

One source for the coil book may have been Simone de Beauvoir’s journal of her own mother’s death from cancer, A Very Easy Death (1965). When Rosenberg read The Second Sex in the mid-70s, along with Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem – the ‘godmothers’ of Second Wave Feminism – she made the effort to acquire all of de Beauvoir’s other non-fiction books, even though they were not yet available in the States. Of all the authors she was reading, she especially admired the French philoso-pher’s fierce sense of independence and autonomy.4 In her brief text, de Beauvoir’s describes with great honesty her ambivalent feelings for her mother, and her own often conflicted reactions to caring for her during the months before her death. A passage from the last chapter in the book has an especial resonance with Rosenberg’s works. “We wanted to give keepsakes to her closest friends. As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and at her blotting-pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more immediately present than in any one of its instants.”5 Rosenberg’s prints preserve such recollection-objects, life in solid form transferred to the drawn line. As recorded in Rosenberg’s prints, her mother’s blouses or dresses reference her absent body, and if the garments are relics, then Rosenberg’s prints may be considered to be reliquaries.

In the mid-1970s, while politically aligned with the Feminist call for equality and respect for women, Rosenberg underwent Freudian analysis. Everyone struggles with issues of identity when entering adulthood, but few choose the challenge of daily psychoanalytic sessions over the course of three years. For Rosenberg, the purpose of this discipline was to come to know herself, and today, it is safe to say that Rhoda knows who she is as an adult, as a child who grew up in a tight-knit Russian secular Jewish family in Philadelphia, and as a contemporary artist – threads as inextricably knotted together as the carborundum-based lines in her recent prints. If today we are well past the search for an essentialist female aesthetic that occasionally characterized the second wave of the women’s movement, the emphasis on process, as well as the definition of personal identity in terms of interpersonal relationships, continue to characterize the work of many contemporary women artists, Rosenberg among them. Rosenberg’s oeuvre avoids the confessional or self-absorbed, while bringing deeply internalized emotions to the surface. Her recent vocabulary of coils and spirals, knots and cords, addresses the binaries growth and regression, change and stagnation that characterize relationships over time.

family history“Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously re–presenting ourselves to ourselves, and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise.”6

a b ov e

My Mother’s Legs, 1991 etchingplates 7½ x 5 inches, 7½ x 5 inchespaper 15 x 22 inchesr i g h t

Mom’s Legs With Shoes, 1991etchingplate 8 x 6 inchespaper 17 x 15 inches

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here to an image of traumatic collapse: these ‘mortal coils’ are now tangles in the process of plunging into an undifferentiated mass. This print makes explicit what is implied in the rest of the series: emotional awareness and understanding come forth through the body. Indeed the open, looping ropes that surround two blue spirals in Coming Forth (2008) resemble a torso. In La Robe (2008) the spirals are reduced to scribbled doodles overrun by the knotted carborundum ropes that snake across the surface toward the child-like drawing of her mother’s Marimekko dress. Like Janine Antoni’s Moor (2001), a tightrope braided from clothes donated by her parents and friends, these ropes are unmistakably umbilical cords, that most elemental of human connections. It is here that Rosenberg forcefully asserts her identity through matrilineal descent.

Twisted, knotted, or broken under their own weight, the cords are not lifeless: they contain within them a delicate thread, visible on close viewing, containing an energy that connects one section to the next. In Tightly Bound (2008), the knotted cord, tangled as it is, still circumnavigates a navel-like spiral before drifting down to the print’s lower right hand corner. An umbilical cord may be tied off at a child’s birth, but its function as a life-giving source of nourishment retains its symbolic power, which is why the Xhosa in South Africa bury the afterbirth outside their homes. The unbreakable mother-daughter dyad referenced in Rosenberg’s knotted cords is equally important in the work of the artist Rosenberg most admires: the late Louise Bourgeois, who has said, “My works are portraits of a relationship, and the most important one was my mother. Now, how these feelings for her feed into my work is

for the scroll/journal; occasionally, she hand-reproduced the lined writing paper on which they wrote as well. Although segments of these cropped notes punctuate the majority of the works in the exhibition, there is little in the inscribed words that is revealing: either the reproduced correspondence is so miniscule as to be illegible, or the fragmentary phrases are mundane. On a literal level, they are indicative of the su-perficiality of most family conversations; nonetheless, the words are not insignificant. The sentence fragments in Dear Sylvia, from 2009 for instance, recall the samplers that young girls were required to stitch in the 18th and 19th centuries, and to which artists such as Rosemary Tröckel and Annette Messager refer in their work as well. Through the process of tracing her grandmother’s words to her mother, (misplaced commas and all): “I appreciate that you are, so, devoted to me…” she in effect edits out the sentimentality of traditional sampler boilerplate – “Dear Mother, I am young and cannot show, Such work as I unto your goodness owe” – leaving only the core of genuine sentiment.

The introduction of handwritten text into the visual image by feminist artists of the 1970s was startling at a time when the experience of modernist art was theorized as purely visual. From the late 1960s on, Joan Snyder, May Stevens and others appro-priated the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, and without lessening its expressive force, extended it to the personal idiosyncrasies of handwriting. Whether or not their texts were autobiographical, these artists intuitively recognized that the hand-written note contains the energy of touch transferred over time. In addition, as Stevens has noted, these artists honored the fact that women kept the family records, frequently in the form of annotated photo albums that became family history. As the custom of writing letters atrophies, to be replaced by electronic texting, hand-written notes become primary documents of more than just personal significance; they are cultural records as well. Rosenberg has always kept journals, and often made books of collaged family photographs as gifts to her parents.9 Her prints declare the signifi-cance of these waning tools of communication, while judiciously editing its content.

from spirals and Coils to tangles and CordsIn the end, the content of Rosenberg’s work is imbedded in the shapes she creates with such technical mastery; it is here that the emotive narrative is recounted. Journal (2006) is a simple double spiral, with the larger unraveling to begin reforming on its left, in a process rather like looping a ball of yarn at the start of knitting. This flat spiral of words, blue against a golden ground, is like an icon, a meditative object constructed from delicate, jewel-like threads. As the series progresses, these delicate spirals are overlaid or juxtaposed with gestural, black coils that begin to move vig-orously into space, as in Mom’s Coil #5 (2007). The theme of doubling, begun with Journal, continues with the introduction of separate plates printed onto one image in order to underscore themes of separation and connection. In this more recent work, the ground is often smudged, with fingerprints emphasizing its tactility. And finally, in the woodcut Collapsing Coils (2008), the tactile becomes visceral, as the yarn/rope metamorphosizes into intestines. The metaphors of growth and change yield

l e f t

Collapsing Coils, 2008four color reduction woodcutplate 32 x 24 inchespaper 37 x 24 inchesCollection, Museum of Fine Arts Bostonr i g h t

Coming Forth, 2009woodcut, carborundum intaglio, chine collé, monoprint transfer, 36.5 x 24 inchesPrivate collection

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notes

1. Statement in artist’s notebook, ca. 1992-32. In her classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich wrote: “I no longer have fantasies – they are the unhealed child’s fantasies, I think – of some infinitely healing conversation with her, in which we could show all our wounds, transcend the pain we have shared as mother and daughter, say everything to last. But in writing these pages, I am admitting, at least, how important her existence is and has been for me.” (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1976/1986) p.2243. Like the canisters of classic films that Joseph Beuys exhibited during his lifetime, the sculpture is a container for inaccessible content.4. Interview with the artist, June 8, 20105. Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1969) p.85-66. Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) p.1067. When Sylvia Rosenberg moved in with Rhoda’s family, she gave the piano to Rhoda’s older brother Nate. When Nate decided to sell it, Rhoda purchased it from him in installments through regular deductions from her paycheck.8. Rhoda Rosenberg, brochure statement, Rhoda Rosenberg: Fragments of the Past,” (April 24-May 29, 2010) HallSpace, Dorchester, MA9. She also supported herself through Temple University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts as a copy editor.10. Rachel Cooke, “My Art Is a Form of Restoration,” interview with Louise Bourgeois, The Observer, 2001/10/14, n.p.11. Kiki Smith: Art:21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Interviews and essay by Susan Sollins; ed., Marybeth Solling (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2003) p.4612. Interview with the artist, June 13, 2010

both complex and mysterious.” And referring to the influence of weaving and sewing from her parents tapestry firm, Bourgeois adds, “My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.”10 Rosenberg’s cords also reference the ‘knots’ that twist our insides at times of deep emotion.

The clothes, photographs and letters that Rosenberg has carefully preserved are the witnesses to the complex process by which her memories are given shape. The monumental book, Umbilicus – the centerpiece of this exhibition – is in effect an epic poem narrated through memories accessible only through visceral emotion, but indelibly bound together by the resonant black carborundum cords, and secured by the repeated images and patterns of her mother’s clothes. The inverse of Dear Sylvia, Love Rhoda, here life unfolds in constantly changing, often surprising configura-tions; near the end, a letter from 1956 joins the future with the past. A summation of the past four years of work, Matrilineal Threads is a compendium of her visual vocabulary, harnessed for a complex and rewarding narrative.

rosenberg as Printmaker “You have to have a kind of physical devotion or dedication…to be stubborn and persevere until you get it right. That’s why I like printmaking or working in sculpture because it’s a generous way of working in the sense that you can go forwards and backwards…For me, what I like is that it’s work...And at the same time, the most pleasurable part of it is actually in the freedom. It’s more like a meditation, or it gives you this enormous freedom…You just sit and do this repetitive little motion over and over, and that makes you free.” Kiki Smith11

Kiki Smith’s description of her working process applies equally well to Rosenberg’s. She loves printmaking because it’s not immediate; she can “go forwards and back-wards,” and transform mistakes to achieve unexpected results. She has no plan, no idea in advance of what the print will look like. In that sense her artistic process parallels the analysand’s stream of consciousness speech. As she has stated, “I get an idea and then start a plate about it – it’s a sketch. I am cavalier about materials, despite their cost. I make many plates, just to start working. I take a needle and make a sketch, or I work physically, gouging the plate like a sculptor. I do not consider the surface to be precious…I love inking the plate because I do not know how it will come out.”12

Describing the development of Hi, Mom, she told me that it started with a print from the 1990s that she made on the back of an old litho plate; she sketched the oval, with the words, “Hi, Mom,” and then drew the chest-like impediment in front of it; after making a single print, she threw out the plate, but the print remained in her files. The second small plate was begun in 2008, when she was experimenting with open coils; with this print, she decided that did not care for the effect achieved with the white ground. When she began to work with the larger plate, she was able to incorporate the two smaller prints, neither of which she would have exhibited

singly, using chine collé. She then carefully inked the looping carborundum cords so that they would not be so solid as to obscure the older, smaller efforts. The result is a collage of her past and her present approaches to art making, in form and in process akin to the albums she gifted to her father and mother, and which she stores in the upstairs ‘ancestors’ bedroom.

The references to her artistic history are equally important, however, as Rosenberg has never stopped making art despite the enormous time commitments required through her teaching. The rich, highly textured blacks of the carborundum cords derive in part from her encounter in the 1960s with Antoni Tapies’ sand and cement paintings. His use of simple shapes as signs has also been an important formal influ-ence on her work.

In terms of content, Rosenberg’s work is situated within the larger stream of work by Eva Hesse, Kiki Smith, May Stevens, Annette Messager, Joanne Leonard, Louise Bourgeois and other women artists who explore identity in terms of familial and interpersonal relationships, as experienced and as remembered. In each case the artists’ intimate engagement with materials facilitated the invention of a system of personal notation. The result is an art of narration; neither autobiography, nor the story of a life, but a visualization of how one’s past indelibly constructs one’s present.

La Robe, 2008 carborundum intaglio, chine collé, soft and hard ground etching, woodcutplate 8 x 22 inchespaper 16 x 28 inches

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Pulled Apart, 2010

Umbilicus, detail, 2009

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Tightly Bound, Almost There, 2008soft and hard ground etchingplate 9 x 19¾ inchespaper 15 x 22½ inchesa b ov e

Hi Mom, 2008carborundum intaglio, chine collé, drypoint, white groundplate 9 x 19¾ inches paper 18 x 28 inches

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reality, not realism

Rosenberg’s mastery of drawing and print making were cultivated during her edu-cation at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960’s. At the Academy, Rosenberg was required to draw from plaster cast reproductions of Greek and Ro-man statuary. Her virtuoso drawing skills received recognition, but Rosenberg soon found that she was less interested in literal representation of the Elgin Marbles, for example, than she was in the relationships of the mass and forms to the content (or the story telling) in the sculpture.

Rosenberg says: “The trouble with reality is that realism gets in its way.” What she means is she is more interested in conveying meaning, rather making a drawing/print that looks “realistic.” The trace of the connection of an object to a person or narrative interests Rosenberg.

Rosenberg speaks eloquently about her interest in letters and words. From both sides of her family, from a very young age, mark making and using words was seen as an endeavor that commanded deep respect and honor. But the primary source for using words in her work comes from her grandfather Nathan Moscovitz. He made a living as a Penman, taking photographs of people and writing calligraphy testimonials. His craft combined Jewish respect for stories, words and language.

Rosenberg’s mother was the archivist for the family. She preserved any family docu-ments that came into her hands. These included family letters, photographs and even practice sheets of words written in indigo blue pencil by her grandmother. Rosenberg found all these documents after her mother passed away. The words, marks, conversa-tions and stories became the content for Rosenberg’s art making.

Rosenberg treats each print like a construction site. Adding layer to layer, so the surface becomes richer and richer. For her, there is reality embedded into each layer. Her work includes bits and pieces of the real. In its form, it is like the layers found in paintings by Brice Marden, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Giocometti, and Mark Rothko artists she considers to be important to her development. The relationship to Marden is found in the multiple layers used to create a luscious and luminous unified final product in which the individual layers and the content are hinted at but not readily evident. In making her work, the parts are subsumed and transformed in the final product. The pieces embedded into the print ultimately become a new reality.

essay by Catherine Mayes

As former Senior Curator at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, Catherine Mayes de-veloped an exhibition program which explored the Museum’s collections through the lens of contem-porary art makers, and organized On Their Own, a show featuring Rhoda Rosenberg, in 2004.

Dear Sylvia, 2009carborundum intaglio, chine collé,woodcut, drypoint, plate 12 x 15 inchespaper 15 x 18½ inches

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Duet Lioc #3, 2007drypoint, etching, chine collé plates 7 x 6¾ inches, 6 x 5 inches paper 14½ x 16½ inches r i g h t

Passing Grade #2, 2008carborundum intaglio, chine collé, etching plate 12 x 25 inchespaper 19 x 22 inches

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biography

Born in Philadelphia, PA in 1944, artist Rhoda Rosenberg credits her Russian Jewish family as influential to her work, particularly her father Samuel, a butcher; her musically talented mother Sylvia; and elder brother Nate. Rosenberg’s maternal grandmother Rebecca, “Bubbie,” also lived with the family, and she was often surrounded by relatives. Close family ties formed during childhood have been the subject of the Rosenberg’s work for the past decade and remain a continuing source of inspiration.

After receiving a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Rosenberg graduated with a BFA in printmaking from the Fine Arts Department at Temple University in 1976, and with an MFA in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1982. On the Faculty at the Museum School since her graduation, Rosenberg has also taught at the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, the Danforth Museum School of Art, and at Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Recipient of numerous awards, Rosenberg was a Finalist in Printmaking for a Massachusetts Council on the Arts Grant in 1979, and received the School of the Museum of Fine Arts' Russell T. Smith Award in 2003. In 2007 she was honored with an Atlantic Papers Materials Award at Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial, and twice received grants from the Artist Resource Trust Grant at the Berkshire Taconic Foundation in 2007 and 2010.

Rosenberg’s prints and artist books have appeared in one person and group shows since 1979, and Rosenberg’s recent solo exhibitions include The Shape of Memory, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA (2010); Rhoda Rosenberg: Fragments of the Past, Hallspace, Dorchester, MA (2010); New Work, Artist Proof Gallery, Johannesburg, (2008); On Their Own, The Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA (2004); and Recent Work: Etchings and Books, Emmanuel College, Boston (1993). Her work is in numerous private collections, as well as in the permanent collections of the Danforth Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Bubbie's Bag, 2003 carborundum intaglioplate 23¾ x 315∕8 inches paper 29½ x 37 inchesa b ov e

Self Portrait, 2009etching, chine collé 10 x 8 inches

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a b ov e

Hi Mom, 2008carborundum intaglio, chine collé, drypoint, white groundplate 9 x 19¾ inches, paper 18 x 28 inchesr i g h t

Bubbie's Bag, 2003carborundum intaglio, plate 26 x 33½ inchespaper 30½ x 37¾ inches

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acknowledgements

We are grateful for the trust and engagement of the artist Rhoda Rosenberg as well as collaboration with curators Pamela Allara and Catherine Mayes, whose work on the exhibition Rhoda Rosenberg: The Shape of Memory inspired further exploration of an artist whose prints and artist books make visible the emotional power of all things.

This catalog has been realized thanks to a grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust from the Berkshire Community Foundation, as well as the generosity of many individu-als, including Dave and Barbara Barbuto, Evelyn Benson, Brigit and Charles Blyth, Stephanie Boye, Joyce and Bill Cummings, Carol and Richard Daynard, Marion and Stan Freedman Gurspan, Lori and Richard Hammermesh, Gay Hapgood, Mary Harvey, Hartley and Rosemary Hoskins, Carl McManama, and Judi Blair, Christo-pher Mekal, Dr. Andrew Plaut, Judy Quinn, David and Deborah Rasiel, Joanne and Barry Reynolds, Jo Ann Rothschild and Lewis Rosenberg, Toby & Alan Rotman, and several anonymous donors. Special thanks are also due to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

John Colan deserves special recognition for catalog design, as well as Stewart Cle-ments and Will Howcroft at Clements-Howcroft Photography for high quality reproductions. Thanks also go to individuals in the Danforth Museum of Art com-munity, including Curatorial Associates Jessica Roscio and Kristina Wilson, and Tufts Curatorial Intern Sue Meeker.

Finally, the artist would like to thank her family for their inspiration and support. This catalog is dedicated to the memory of her maternal grandmother Rebecca Moscovitz, her parents Sylvia and Sam Rosenberg, and brother Nate Rosenberg who continue to affect Rosenberg’s work in profound and unexpected ways.

Dad’s Eulogy, 2011reduction woodcut plate 24½ x 47 inchespaper 31 x 53 inches

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Credits

danforth museum of art

Director Katherine frenchFinance Mary Kiely Administrative brendan VogtCuratorial Jessica roscioDevelopment Danielle silvaMembership Michael LupacchinoVisitor Services Martha Phillips

danforth museum school

Director of Education Pat WalkerMuseum School Registrar emily giacommaraEducation Outreach Coordinator ann o’ConnellMuseum Education Coordinator Kendra Keefer Mcgee

Unless otherwise noted, all prints courtesy of the artist.

photo credits

Clements-Howcroft Photography

publication credits

Editor Katherine frenchPrinting Kirkwood PrintingDesign John Colan

Danforth Museum of Art123 Union AvenueFramingham, MA 01702

© 2011 Danforth Museum of ArtAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Broken Glasses, 2011carborundum intaglio, drypoint, chine collé, woodcutplate 9½ x 15 inchespaper 16 x 22 inches