Rose Marasco
Rose Marasco (born December 25, 1948), is an American photographer. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Southern Maine, and is thought to be Maine’s “most prolific photographer,” living and working there since 1979.[1]
Biography
Rose Marasco grew up in Utica, New York. She studied photography in college, first at Syracuse University, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (1969-1971) and later at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York (1988-1991) where she completed her Master of Fine Arts under Nathan Lyons, and was mentored by Frank Gohlke, who would later write the introduction to a catalog for an exhibition of her Maine Grange Halls series.[2]
Marasco has been an exhibited artist since 1971 with twenty-three solo shows and more than sixty group shows. She developed the photography program at the University of Southern Maine, and taught there for 35 years, retiring in 2014. She also initiated a program at Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute, in Utica in 1974, and gives lectures in the US and abroad.[3]
A major solo exhibition of the series “Domestic Objects: Past and Presence” was held by the University of Southern Maine in 2004[4] and was accompanied by a book listed by Photoeye as “a ten year retrospective of Marasco's lush large format cibachrome photographs on the poetics of everyday household objects.” [5] In 2015 The Portland Museum of Art mounted a major retrospective of her work, organized by PMA Chief Curator Jessica May.[6] Describing her method in a review of the exhibition, critic John Yau wrote “Marasco has remained uninterested in genres such as documentary, landscape, and portraiture. Instead, she has consistently mined concepts of framing, point of view, and orientation to make images with a complex relationship to the everyday image of the world.”[7] In 2016 she was awarded the Maine Women's Fund Sarah Orne Jewett Award, given to "a Maine woman who exhibits the attributes of the women in Jewett’s works of fiction: true grit, independence, courage, humor and discipline."[8] She received the 2005 Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from Santa Fe Center for Photography New Mexico.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
- 2015 “Rose Marasco: index” Portland Museum of Art
- 2015 “Patrons of Husbandry" Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine
- 2014 "New York City Pinhole Photographs" Meredith Ward Fine Art, New York
- 2010 "Projections" Houston Center for Photography
- 2008 "The Invented Photograph" Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France
- 2004 "Domestic Objects: Past and Presence" University of Southern Maine
- 2003 "Circles" Sarah Morthland Gallery, New York
- 2002 "Open House: Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat”, Portland Museum of Art
- 2000 “Leafing” Sarah Morthland Gallery, New York
- 1999 "Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange" College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, Maine
- 1998 “New England Diary” Sarah Morthland Gallery, New York
- 1996 "Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange" Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga, Latvia
- 1995 "Tender Buttons: Women’s Domestic Objects" Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
- 1992 "Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange" Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
- 1982 “Rose Marasco: Photomontage” Portland School of Art
- 1980 “Rose Marasco: Photographs” Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont
Public Collections
- Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
- Bowdoin College Museum of Art
- Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College
- Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
- Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection
- Fogg Museum at Harvard University
- The Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine
- Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland, Maine
- National Museum of American History
- New York Public Library Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
- Photographic Resource Center, Artists’ Book Archive, Boston, Massachusetts
- Polaroid International Collection, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Portland Museum of Art
- Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island
- Syracuse University, Newhouse Communications Center, Syracuse, New York
- University of New England Art Gallery, Portland, Maine
- University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine
- Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York
Teaching
- 2016–present Artist Mentor, MFA Studio, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
- 2014 Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Art, University of Southern Maine
- 2010-2014 Distinguished Professor, Department of Art, University of Southern Maine
- 2000-2010 Professor, Department of Art, University of Southern Maine
- 2007–present Artist Mentor, MFA Studio, The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, Massachusetts
- 1981-1987 Instructor, Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art)
- 1981 Visiting Professor, Colby College, Waterville, Maine
- 1974-1979 Instructor & Founding Head of Photography, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY
Books
Covers
“Camouflage” by Murray Bail (2001) Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“Latest Will: New & Selected Poems” by Lenore Marshall (2002) W.W. Norton & Company
“Confessions” by Kang Zhengguo (2007) W.W. Norton & Company
“Mouth Wide Open” by John Thorne (2007) North Point Press
Work included in
“Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews” by Frank Gohlke (2009) Hol Art Books
“Portland Through the Lens” (2007) warren machine company
“Undomesticated Interiors” (2003) essays by April Gallant and Mimi Hellman, Smith College Museum of Art
“Designing Identity” (2000) Marc English Rockport Publishers
“The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society” by Lucy R. Lippard (1997) The New Press
“Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange” essay by Frank Gohlke Amazon Books
“Selections 4: Polaroid International Exhibition” (1988) essay by Mark Haworth-Booth
Recent Critical Reviews
“A Photographer Who Deserves to be Widely Known” Hyperallergic
“In Portland, a survey of Rose Marasco’s photographs” Boston Globe
“It’s Portland photographer Rose Marasco’s moment to be seen” The Sound
“Both smoke AND mirrors: Photography of Rose Marasco” Press Herald
“In a summer of art, a Rose blooms” Press Herald
“The Search for Juxtapositions” Artfuse
“Portland Photographer’s Retrospective Exhibition” Maine Today
“From Invention to the Ordinary: Five Decades of Photography by Rose Marasco” Portland Phoenix
“New Perspectives on Familiar Themes” Artscope
“Through a Rose Colored Lens” Down East
“New York City Pinhole Photographs” NY Photo Review