Winter 2001-2002
SCULPTOR Rose Invokes Architecture and Memory
Photo by Diana Watters
THOMAS ROSE
Education
M.A. 1967, U of California, Berkeley
B.F.A 1965, U of Illinois, Urbana
Professional history
1972-present: art faculty, U of Minnesota
1969-1972: instructor, sculpture and graphics, New Mexico State U
Selected honors & awards
Best Gardens Award for landscape design, 1999
National Endowment for the Arts, Diverse Visions Grant, with Beth Corning, 1995
McKnight Humanities Fund for "Communities in Context," 1994
McKnight Research Fellowship, 1993-1996
Exhibitions
Recent work includes solo exhibitions in Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C.; group exhibitions throughout the U.S.; and international exhibitions such as Korea, Clay, and Fire in North and South Korea.
Tidbits
Aside from his customary role as an artist, Tom is doing work as an architect. Some current projects include designing a residence/gallery in Miami and working with architects developing Minneapolis's light rail transit stations.
The glass-and-steel works of sculptor Thomas Rose might remind one of skyscrapers or modern houses. And though the pieces aren't large enough to live in, they often require a small fleet of craftspeople and a significant budget to complete. Rose regularly taps machinists to fashion parts or get advice. Blueprints and budgets are as much a part of his artistic process as inspiration and happy accident. His studio operates like a small business.
So when Rose, a professor of sculpture at the University since 1972, was awarded the Fesler-Lampert Professorship in Humanities this fall, he was ecstatic. The $55,000 award was like lottery lucre for a guy who, even as a kid, had never had a knack for math.
"It gives me an uncluttered mind," says Rose, when asked about the chair's benefits. "Because 95 percent of the time I'm thinking, 'How am I going to pay for all this?'"
Financial concerns have hardly slowed Rose's artistic output in recent years, however. His art has appeared at the Steinbaum/Krauss Gallery in New York, the Berkeley Festival of the Arts in California, and the Flanders Gallery in Minneapolis. The Walker Art Center owns one of his pieces, and in 1999 the City of Minneapolis recognized Rose for his work in landscape design. Rose isn't afraid to step outside the traditional bounds of sculpture: He's currently working with architecture professor Garth Rockcastle--who designed the U's new art building--on plans for a house in Miami.
Art has been Rose's passion since childhood. "I've always really liked making things," he says. "But I had a an older brother who was a painter, so I had a tendency to avoid art classes." Still, the urge to tinker and construct objects was irresistible. He eventually studied sculpture at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the University of California, Berkeley, before traveling to Lund University in Sweden to concentrate on graphic art and photography. "There was something very magical about making things from scratch," Rose says. "I found myself spending all of my time doing it."
Rose's current work unmistakably echoes the forms of architecture and buildings. A desk made of stainless steel, glass, and aluminum plate, for example, has a slanted top that resembles the slope of a roof and drawers not unlike the rooms of a house. Much of Rose's work is rooted in memories of his childhood home--a house in Milwaukee designed by his grandfather. Rose doesn't try to reconstruct the rooms of the house, but his pieces do convey something of his experience, the feel of those recollections. "Even today," he says, "you go into a room or look at a particular space and you like it because of some perception or enigmatic character or quality that the thing has that resonates with those early experiences."
At the heart of a viewer's experience with such pieces, Rose argues, is the process of making analogies. Viewers make parallel observations, drawing on their own experiences to interpret the artwork. The piece may trigger memories of childhood or a particular home, or it may summon up different experiences altogether. But viewers are forever testing analogies between the work and their own experiences, much as the artist's own life and opinions inform the creation of a piece.
It's that ability to make analogies, to convey human experience, that makes the study of art and the humanities a worthwhile endeavor, Rose argues. "Artists are very good at constructing analogies," he says. "And in some ways, the liberal arts train people not so much how to do any one thing, but how to make and construct analogies."
Painters, for example, see themselves not only as people skilled in the use of oils and brushes, but as creative artists capable of expressing the same ideas that permeate music, literature, business, and philosophy. Robbed of brush and canvas, they would likely find ways to communicate their ideas and experiences-through computer programming, finance, medicine, or cooking.
"A person trained in art is not an unskilled person," says Rose. "This person comes out of school with an enormous amount of ability in the sense of being able to apply this way of rethinking.
"People with degrees in art or art history often are much more interesting and trainable for business or communications. Yes, they can go out and be artists or a historians, but they can be lots of other things as well. The critical issue is vision."