ART ROSENBAUM AND MARGO NEWMARK ROSENBAUM: JOURNEYS IN ART, MUSIC, AND FOLKLORE
Curated by John Lee Matney
January 22 - June 8, 2021
Art and Margo Rosenbaum have spent their careers and marriage traveling across different media and modes through various states of space and time. Trained and active in painting, they have also for over 50 years documented the heritage of American roots music and folk culture through recordings, drawings and paintings, essays, and photographs. These varied media have been compiled in books and box sets, including Art of Field Recording Vol I and II: Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum. Volume 1 of the set won a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album in 2008. These varied practices intersect and complement each other as both artists capture the identity of a nation as expressed through its musical and folk traditions and express their own personal preoccupations in their paintings. The exhibition at the Linda Matney Gallery, Art and Margo Rosenbaum: Journeys in Art, Music, and Folklore, presents a rich overview of their collaborative and individual efforts, including Margo’s photographs and Art’s film and audio recordings that document roots musicians across the country alongside their expressive paintings and drawings.
The Rosenbaums’ practice is rooted in mid-century modernist figurative painting that, like American folk music, balances personal expression with universal experience. Margo Newmark Rosenbaum (b. 1939) was initially introduced to the Bay Area Figurative movement as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute where she studied with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. In reaction to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, these San Francisco Bay artists reintroduced recognizable subject matter into abstract painting through which they evoked a strong sense of place. Art Rosenbaum (b. 1938) also emerged from the post-Abstract Expressionist milieux, finding influences in the abstract, socially-minded narratives of Philip Guston and John Heliker. Art majored in Art History and later earned an MFA in Painting at Columbia University in his native New York where he also dabbled in the city’s nascent folk music scene. While in college, he also began to capture field recordings of unknown and unsung blues and folk musicians. With these early roots in painting, performance, and cataloging, the paths of Art and Margo converged in New York, where they met and married in 1966 after Art returned from studying in Paris. In 1968, Art secured a teaching position at the University of Iowa where Margo acquired an interest in photography while earning an MA in Painting. The couple eventually settled in Athens, Georgia in 1976 where Art assumed a teaching position for the next thirty years at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, serving as the first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts before his retirement in 2006.
Margaret Richardson, Ph.D., Lecturer of Art History, Christopher Newport University
Margo Newmark Rosenbaum