KAY ROSEN
Prints and Drawings
December 14, 2023 – February 3, 2024
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Kay Rosen: Prints and Drawings, on view in the back galleries from December 14, 2023 through February 3, 2024. This solo exhibition features a selection of Rosen’s works on paper along with a new silkscreen print edition. A public opening reception will be held Thursday, December 14, from 6-8 PM.
Since the 1970s, Kay Rosen has been exploring the formal and ontological functions of language as a wellspring of artistic potential. Her unique applications of scale, color, design, and typography shift familiar interpretations of everyday words and phrases, reveling in the mutability of text and image. Language, for Rosen, is seen as “found material,” which can be enabled and activated through minimal intervention on the part of the artist. Wit and levity are integral to the tone of her “verbal shortcuts,” provoking incisive and enduring perspectives on contemporary social and political issues.
Rosen’s new silkscreen print edition, entitled SOUNDTRACK (2023), references an earlier series of work from the 1990s, which similarly employed the compositional strategy of blacked-out text. In this new print, three lines of text displayed across six panels, each with a specific combination of concealed and uncovered letters. The complete message, revealed in the final panel, has been successively “remixed” into six unique conceptual readings. The six unique graphical arrangements evoke multiple associations and emotions, such as the initial “discovery” of the hidden words, the starting and stopping of a music track, a pulsing four-on-the-floor beat, and the revelatory joy and communion that defines disco culture. These significations draw thematic resonance from the 2007 essay “Dance Dance Revolution: Disco as a Clarion Call to Aspiration” by writer and friend of the artist David Scott. As Rosen’s SOUNDTRACK demonstrates, suppression and obfuscation are futile; the language of disco, and its universal spirit, persists.
An interview between Rosen and writer and curator Terry R. Myers will be published in the December-January issue of The Brooklyn Rail, and feature a discussion of SOUNDTRACK within the context of Rosen’s larger oeuvre and current practice.
Kay Rosen was born 1943 in Corpus Christi, TX. Her work is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Kay Rosen. NOW AND THEN at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen, Germany, her first major institutional show in Europe. Her billboard-sized mural HI was installed on permanent public view at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, in March of 2023. In 2021, Rosen was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, to create a site-responsive installation for the Gallery’s East Building; her large-scale painting, entitled SORRY, was on view through March 2022.
A two-venue mid-career survey entitled Kay Rosen: Li[f]eli[k]e, curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers was exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Otis College of Art Design in 1998-99. Other solo exhibitions include shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2017); Contemporary Art Museum Houston and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria, in collaboration with Matt Keegan (2016); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2014); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2013); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2012); and University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (2004). Rosen was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000 as well as in 1991 as part of Group Material’s “AIDS Timeline.”
Rosen has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), the SJ Weiler Fund Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2009), and three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants (1995, 1989, 1987). Her work is included in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France; and The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH, among many others.
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