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Martha Rosler is the art world defender of the downtrodden. Like Wonder Woman, if Wonder Woman was a little old lady living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Rosler has tackled sexism, racism, homelessness, war, gentrification and a slue of other societal issues via photomontage, video, installation, and photography. She knew from the very beginning that she, "...was going to be either an artist or a criminal." Luckily she turned out to be an artist. She earned her BFA from Brooklyn College and her MFA from University of California, San Diego. While in Southern California, Rosler started making her most prominent feminist art, including a video of her in the kitchen acting out kitchen utensils from A to Z with increasing intensity. She was not about that domestic life though and became a prominent part of the feminist art movement in the 1970s.
Rosler wasn’t about that war life, either and created two series of photographs combining images of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars with pleasant household images to literally bring home her anti-violence message. She wrote of these works, “So much of my work involved the Vietnam War that it would have been obscene to show it in a gallery. But now, it’s different; it’s important to remember and to enable the young to discover what to some of us is still so present.” Rosler really throws a wrench in that whole ignorance-is-bliss thing. Don’t you just hate that?
Sources
- Rush, Michael. "Martha Rosler: Reviews & Interviews". Martharosler.net. N.p., 2000. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
- Saltz, Jerry. "Welcome To The Sixties, Yet Again". NYMag.com. N.p., 2008. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.
- In Conversation With Martha Rosler (Interview). New York: Another Gaze Journal, 2016. video.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
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