Cranbrook Academy of Art to Confer Distinguished Alumni Award on Annabeth Rosen
Ceremony and Conversation on November 16 Museum Exhibition to Open the Same Evening
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH., Oct. 25, 2018 — Cranbrook Academy of Art is pleased to announce that it will confer its 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award on Annabeth Rosen (Ceramics ’81).
Rosen will receive the award and have a public discussion about her work with curator Valerie Cassel Oliver at Cranbrook Art Museum on November 16 at 5pm in conjunction with the opening of her exhibitionAnnabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped at the Art Museum the same evening.
The Distinguished Alumni Award is one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy and recognizes graduates who have demonstrated creativity, innovation, leadership, and vision through their contributions to the practices of architecture, art, and design, as well as to Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Past recipients of the award include McArthur Binion (Painting ’73), Peter Bohlin (Architecture ’61), Niels Diffrient (Design ’54), Anne Wilson (Fiber ’72), Donald Lipski (Ceramics ’73), and Ed Fella (Design ’87).
A critically-acclaimed pioneer in the field of ceramics, Rosen brings a deep knowledge of the material’s history and processes to the realm of contemporary art. Within the genre’s trajectory, Rosen functions as an important link between artists such as Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Jun Kaneko, and Peter Voulkos, as well as a new generation of artists working with the medium.
For more than two decades, Rosen has consistently expanded her practice to encompass installations that meld materiality and process. Her works, whether diminutive or monumental, are composed through laborious additive processes that push the medium beyond spectacle and into dialogues about endurance, labor, and feminist thought, as well as nature, destruction, and regeneration.
Rosen also embraces process and chance as instrumental in the formation of her art objects. Twisting and shaping the clay, Rosen creates what has been described as organic forms—fragmented figurations of flowers, tubers, leaves, and root-like structures that are skillfully fired together and then arranged in large grids or as standalone works. Rosen has said of her work, “I break almost as much ceramics as I make, and I think I learn as much about the work by doing so. Much of the work is made with already fired parts broken, reassembled, re-glazed, and re-fired with the addition of wet clay elements if necessary. I work with a hammer and chisel, and I think of the fired pieces as being as fluid and malleable as wet clay.”
About her time at Cranbrook, Rosen said, “The atmosphere during my two years of study at Cranbrook was charged with the multidisciplinary and intellectual creativity of working resident artists and fellow students. The impact of that time has had an inestimable and lifelong influence on my work.”
Her exhibition, Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped will be on view at Cranbrook Art Museum from Nov. 17 through March 10, 2019. The exhibition features more than 100 pieces and includes large-scale works on paper that mirror the trajectory of the work executed in clay. It will open alongside the exhibitions Binion/Saarinen: A McArthur Binion Project (Binion is also an Academy graduate and past Distinguished Alumni Award recipient) and Danielle Dean: A Portrait of a True Red. Dean is the current Photography Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
The November 16 events include:
5pm
Annabeth Rosen in Conversation with Valerie Cassel Oliver
deSalle Auditorium, Cranbrook Art Museum
Free
6-7pm
ArtMembers VIP Reception Celebrating All Fall Exhibitions
7-9pm
Public Opening Reception
$25/at the door; ArtMembers free
Rosen is the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis (UC Davis), a position she has held since 1997. Her work is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery in New York and the Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco. Rosen’s work is in the collection of The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Oakland Museum, The Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and many public and private collections. She has received multiple grants and awards, a Pew Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a UC Davis Chancellors Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and in 2016 was named a USA Artist Fellow. Most recently, Rosen has been granted the Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Media Contact:
Julie Fracker
Director of Communications
Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum
248.645.3329
jfracker@cranbrook.edu
Photo credit: Silvano Sole
