Harry Roseman

I went to PS 161 on Crown Street in Brooklyn, New York. In the sixth grade my teacher was Mrs. Evelyn Weiss.  We made a lot of art and she was terrific.  When I was old enough to cross streets on my own I spent much time at the Brooklyn Museum. Next I went to Lefferts Junior High School on Empire Boulevard and was in the art homeroom class. I attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan.  For college, I graduated from Pratt Institute, again in Brooklyn.  I had a wonderful teacher there in my freshman year: Herbert Beerman.  Also at Pratt, freshman year, I met the artist Catherine Murphy, whom I would marry soon after graduation.

I proceeded to make a lot of art.  Over the years I have had many exhibitions, both group and solo, as well as doing a number of public commissions.  I have been reviewed and interviewed. I am currently a Professor of Art at Vassar College.  These are the things that have added up to who I have become. 

Artist’s Statement

My enterprise is elliptical not linear.  As I proceed I periodically leave the path I am on and go sideways.  As I proceed sideways I am led sideways yet again, again, and again.

The tangents are curved.  They periodically intersect with a previous sideways move and proceed parallel with it.

The subjects of my work are the bend of a curve, the meeting of edges, the turn of a fold, the weight and nature of objects, the conjunction of idea and object, the way an idea sits in an object, next to an object and the way surface can obscure and also reveal.  One of my aims is to close the distance between thinking, looking, and making, to the point where it is hard to tell the difference.

I am interested in the nature of material things, the way they look and the way they behave.  How that can be imbued in a representation of those things/objects holding within that depiction the physics and poetry of matter.