A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Rhoda Rosen

Associate Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

BA, 1984, and BA Honors, MA, 1988, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; PhD, 2009, University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions: House, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago; Imaginary Coordinates, Spertus Museum, Chicago; Encounters at the Edge of the Forest, Gallery 400, Chicago. Publications: Shofar; Flaneur. Recent Conference Proceedings: "Red Line Service."  Relational Poverty Network. Conference presentation. Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, CA. March 30, 2016; "Who is Silencing Whom? Censorship, Self-Censorship, and Charlie Hebdo" February 23, 2015, The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, NY. Awards: Research Associate in the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Team Teaching Award (with Billy McGuinness), SAIC, 2015. Awesome Foundation Grant, February 2015.

Personal Statement

Rhoda Rosen is an art historian and curator currently serving as adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She serves on the Advisory Council of the European Shoah Legacy Institute, incorporated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic on January 20, 2010 as a follow-up to the Terezin Declaration and founded, in part, to seek systemic solutions on an international level leading to restitution of immovable property, art, Judaica, and Jewish cultural assets stolen by the Nazis. Rosen is also a research associate in the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. In July 2014, Rosen spent time as a visiting artist/curator at ACRE Residency, Steuben, Wisconsin, where she met Billy McGuinness. Together they founded Red Line Service, an art collaborative that reframes art as a broad social justice endeavor. She came to the U.S. from South Africa on a Rockefeller Institute Residency Fellowship to the Institute for Advanced Research and Study in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, following which she served for more than a decade as director of Spertus Museum, Chicago. She earned her PhD from the University of Illinois in Chicago and her MA and BA from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work. The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history. There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

1125

Credits

3

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work. The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history. There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

2320

Credits

3

Description

Art has been many things to many people. This class introduces students to the history of art and art-like things on Earth from prehistory to ca. 1800 CE. It covers canonical examples from older scholarship alongside works and contexts emerging in recent art histories. Students will learn to perform basic art historical analysis and research, and the course will prepare them to form personal art histories, applying such art histories to their own work. The course surveys historical art in a global scope, from the beginnings of known culture to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It introduces students to a range of interdisciplinary frameworks for parsing the production, reception, and conceptualization of art. And it challenges students to think about the relationships between past and present, highlighting how later artists and cultures have engaged earlier art and history. There is a small amount of required reading each week-on average about 20 pages. Written work includes weekly reading responses, two in-class quizzes, an annotated bibliography project, and a take-home final exam.

Class Number

2321

Credits

3