A Lifelong Pursuit: Margo Newmark Rosenbaum Shares Vibrant Moments in Work and Pictures

Mainstays of the Athens music and artwork scenes, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum and her husband Artwork Rosenbaum have additionally been instrumental in documenting, preserving and celebrating American conventional music for the higher a part of half a century. Their shared pursuits have pushed them to journey throughout the nation in a quest to doc ballads, blues, spirituals and fiddle tunes that will have in any other case been misplaced to historical past. At present on view on the Lyndon Home Arts Middle, Margo’s new solo exhibition dedicates two separate gallery areas to distinct our bodies of labor in portray and images that discover her unbiased apply and different topics extra deeply.

Born in Los Angeles in 1939, Rosenbaum earned her bachelor of high quality arts diploma in portray on the San Francisco Artwork Institute, the place she studied with Bay Space Figurative Motion artists Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bishoff. She later grew to become serious about images whereas pursuing a MFA from the College of Iowa. Grounded by the motion’s method of abandoning Summary Expressionism in favor of reintroducing extra recognizable parts, her work heart human, animal and generally even mythological topics inside home areas. Background settings are diminished principally to vibrant colour blocks that distinguish architectural parts like flooring, partitions, home windows and doorways from each other. Although created over the course of a number of a long time, the exhibition’s work are remarkably cohesive by means of a constant use of an intense, saturated colour palette and a free narrative high quality.

“Most of my work are based mostly on my stream of acutely aware; nonetheless, when I’ve been strongly struck by some occasion, I’ve felt compelled to make a portray utilizing that topic,” says Rosenbaum. “As an example, once I was in France visiting an artist’s studio, after seeing his work, I went downstairs to his lounge the place his spouse, who had been bedridden for 2 years, was sleeping. I occurred to lookup at her and noticed an ephemeral picture of her bust (head and shoulders) rise out of her, together with the massive hair curler she was carrying. The picture then went down into her and rose once more after which disappeared. Shortly after my seeing these occasions, her husband got here downstairs to verify on her and exclaimed she was lifeless. That have deeply struck me, and I painted the portray ‘Lady in France with Many Cats’ to try to speak the expertise.”

A number of of Rosenbaum’s work juxtapose moodiness with humor, corresponding to “Portrait with Beagle”—which seems on this week’s cowl of Flagpole—a portray of a lady overlaying her ears, as if in response to the framed portrait of a person taking part in an autoharp that hangs above her. “Lady with Canine” depicts a lady mendacity on the ground, ft propped up on a kitchen chair, as a canine hovers over her. It’s unclear whether or not the girl is stressed and agitated, carefree and daydreaming, or even perhaps buzzed, however the viewer can select whichever feels most relatable. Each portray consists of no less than one canine, cat, horse or chicken, and these companions typically coexist with dragons that add a mischievous, fantastical aspect. 

“The dragons symbolize ideas that come to my thoughts when computer systems drive me nuts,” says Rosenbaum.

The Rosenbaums have spent a lot of their marriage and careers working parallel to at least one one other on collaborative tasks wherein Artwork would document musicians as Margo photographed them. Along with the Grammy Award-winning challenge The Artwork of Subject Recording: 50 Years of Conventional Music Documented by Artwork Rosenbaum, her pictures have complemented her husband’s writings in People Visions and Voices: Conventional Music and Tune in North Georgia, Shout As a result of You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Custom on the Coast of Georgia, and The Mary Lomax Ballad E-book: America’s Nice twenty first Century Ballad Singer. The exhibition on the Lyndon Home is a chance to discover a few of her lesser-known photographs. 

“I wished to indicate a few of my pictures which are of topics that haven’t been displayed as a lot as those displaying people artists and musicians,” says Rosenbaum.

Lots of the photographs included within the exhibition seem all through the 200 pages of Drawing With Mild: Pictures by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, an intuitively organized high quality artwork images ebook that was printed in 2021. Because the title signifies, Rosenbaum makes use of her digicam as a instrument for creative expression, not not like drawing with charcoal on paper. With an empathetic coronary heart and a eager eye for composition, she paperwork the world as she sees it by means of unpredictable juxtapositions, delicate humor and a deep reverence for fellow creatives.

The gallery’s sequence begins with an early self-portrait, then comes full circle by ending with a self-portrait just lately taken throughout the pandemic wherein a mirror displays the masked artist standing alongside a painted self-portrait that hangs within the background. What comes between is an assortment of experiences that provide a window into Rosenbaum’s life, corresponding to a shot of Artwork studying a map within the automobile at a fuel station—undoubtedly on a quest to someplace off the crushed path—and a sunlit scene of Silver the cat perched on high of an armchair the place a pair of banjos relaxation. Intimate black-and-white portraits of author James Baldwin, painter Alice Neel, visionary artist Howard Finster and sculptor Edward Kienholz every symbolize particular connections made through the years. 

Spanning over 50 years, Rosenbaum’s pictures collectively mirror a lifelong ardour for observing and memorializing life’s uncommon moments that make the atypical extraordinary. By no means seeming stiff or staged, her snapshots vibrate with life and don’t have any scarcity of tales behind them. Her work, likewise, are equal components creativeness and social commentary. Rosenbaum’s exhibition will stay on view by means of Oct. 7.

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