Annabeth Rosen
Annabeth Rosen (born 1957 Brooklyn, NY) is an American sculptor, and the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at University of California, Davis, Biography. Rosen received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. She then received her Masters of Fine Arts in 1981 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Rosen went on to teach at Bennington College, from 1993 to 1997. She has taught art at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago , and the University of the Arts. She has been the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis since 1997. Artwork. Explosions of rich, thick patterning often characterize Rosen's work. Her art is most commonly the result of compiling many small organic sculptures in clay to create much larger, energetic and dynamic compositions. She takes a conventional material (clay) and uses it in unconventional ways. Rosen's work is rooted, historically, in tile making; at the beginning of her career she made traditional tiles. She began to question the line between craft and art creating tiles that  covered her entire apartment transforming it from a mundane to a spectacular interior space. Her work, entitled "Sample", helps define her work today. While her work is based on the ideas of functional pottery, decorative architecture and abstract sculpture, her interest is in how her ideas involve and inform the material. An underlying theme in Rosen's work is violence. As a child, she often watched violent action films. As well, her studios in New York and Philadelphia were located in dangerous neighborhoods. Rossen found herself intrigued by the violence that surrounded her. This influence is evident in the raw  forms of her work as well as her approach to aesthetics. Her raw clay forms illustrate the forcefulness and roughness of her touch on the clay. Rosen's work while functionally without utility acquires form and purpose from extended dialogue with the functional. Awards and honors. In 2018 Rosen was inducted into the American Craft Council's College of Fellows. She has received numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a 1992 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award. She received the Distinguished Alumni Award from  Cranbrook in 2019.