Rosen @ Room & Board

Through yet another moment of managed serendipity, I now have the opportunity to share my work with a national audience. Home furnishings retailer Room & Board has launched a collection of limited-edition prints I created. The collection is being rolled out in their stores in major American cities, and online. Based on collages I made from elements found on the sidewalks and streets of New York City, the six pieces—Mint, Aisle 04, Seperation, Locally Packed, Pastelotto, and 411—are pop, poster-sized, signed and framed, in editions of 20. Not only are they colorful, but the collage prints are filled with puns and other lingo, waiting to be decoded. If you’ve been contemplating a blank wall for a long time, and/ or are in the market for a modern sofa, please visit your local Room & Board showroom, or shop here.

42nd on Warren

One of my pieces, 42nd 5th & 6th, a collage made from ephemera I found on that street, will be in Well Put Together: The Art of Collage & Assemblage, a group show at the CCCA Gallery, 209 Warren Street, Hudson, NY. The opening reception is April 6 from 5-7pm. The show runs through May 17.

The Master of the Avenue B School of Art‏

What a thrill it was tonight:  Not only to be in a room arrayed with an abundance of amazing collages by one of my idols, John Evans, but to actually meet him!  And to tell him that he has been a great influence and inspiration for my own collage practice.  He was holding court at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, at a reception celebrating the publication of a book of his works from the year 1984.

For decades, Evans made daily collages in bound books on heavy paper, applying collected gems of ephemera from his East Village neighborhood and life to grounds of watercolor wash, bound by hand-drawn borders—each page date-stamped.  Ducks were his Ninas, and they were all lined up at the gallery this evening, as a continuous motif along the bottoms of his works.  Intimate in size, each piece is about 8” x 5”; each page has been carefully extracted by X-acto knife and metal ruler from Evans’ notebooks.

People love his work for different reasons:  Some are attracted to the dates—Valentine’s day, today, the Ides of March, their birthdays. Others love to interrogate the jewel-like content—stamps, ornate fabric swatches, candy foils, ads, cookie fortunes, found notes, packaging labels. Then there is his signature formalism, the way he incorporates pasted objects with paint, ink,color and wit that magically coalesce into totemic sculpture, akin to the way Leger made 2-D look 3-D. 

I also learned John Evans is a father of twins!