Mia Westerlund Roosen (born 1942) is an American Sculpture, sculptor known for largely abstract, often monumental works that reference the body, eroticism, and primal forms.
[Koplos, Janet]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon, Weinberg,"
''Art in America'', May 2002.[Cohen, David]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon, Weinerg,"
''The New York Sun'', March 18, 2004. Retrieved March 18, 2022.[Kandel, Susan]
''Los Angeles Times'', February 23, 1995. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
Westerlund Roosen emerged as a sculptor during the male-dominated ascendancy of Minimalism (visual arts), minimalism, and was one of a handful of women represented by renowned art dealer Leo Castelli in the 1970s and 1980s.
[Borum, Jenifer P]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''Artforum'', January 1992, p. 105–6. Retrieved March 21, 2022.[Wei, Lilly]
"Beauties and Beasts: A Conversation with Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''Sculpture'', September 1, 2014. Retrieved March 18, 2022.[Rubinfien, Leo]
"Mia Westerlund, Castelli Gallery"
''Artforum'', September 1977, p. 79–80. Retrieved March 22, 2022.[Butler, Sharon]
''Two Coats of Paint'', June 1, 2009. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Critics such as Saul Ostrow and Lilly Wei characterize her art as postminimalism, postminimalist and feminist-influenced, noting its privileging of organic form, handmade processes and surfaces, and evocative possibilities.
[Ostrow, Saul. "Mia Westerlund Roosen's Studies, 1972–2012: Surface, Structure, and Form in Scale,]
''Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculptures 1976-2012''
New York: Betty Cuningham, 2012. Retrieved March 21, 2022.[Brenson, Michael]
''The New York Times'', March 15, 1991, p. C26. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Wei placed Westerlund Roosen among a pioneering group of women that "breached the barricades of Minimalism," individually producing work whose "distinctive, even eccentric forms and wide range of materials served as a rebuttal to the rational geometries, serialization, coolness, and crushing industrial scale" of that movement.
Westerlund Roosen has had solo exhibitions at the Castelli Gallery,
New Museum,
[Glueck, Grace]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''The New York Times'', March 8, 1985. Retrieved March 22, 2022. and Storm King Art Center,
[Prince, Kathy. "Mia Westerlund," ''Vanguard'', October 1978.][Goodman, Jonathan. "Mia Westerlund Roosen: The Storm King Art Center," ''ARTnews'', December 1994, p. 142.] and appeared in shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
[Karmel, Pepe]
"The Stuff of Dreams and the Natural World,"
''The New York Times'', January 5, 1996. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal,
[Stich, Sidra. "Bridges and Grays,]
''Mia Westerlund Roosen''
Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, Hopkins Center for the Arts, 2016. Retrieved March 21, 2022. and SculptureCenter,
among others. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship,
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Fellows. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Anonymous Was A Woman Award,
[Anonymous Was a Woman]
"Awards 2017."
Retrieved March 18, 2022. and Fulbright Program, Fulbright grant.
[Fulbright]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Grantees. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Collection. Retrieved March 18, 2022. National Gallery of Canada,
[National Gallery of Canada]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Artist. Retrieved March 18, 2022. and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others.
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Person. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
She lives and works in New York City and Buskirk, New York.
Early life and career
Westerlund Roosen was born in New York City in 1942, and her early life was divided between there and Cuba. She lived in Toronto between 1964 and 1976.
[Raynor, Vivien]
"Large Sculptures of Pale Presence,"
''The New York Times'', September 3, 1989. Retrieved March 22, 2022. She considered both dance and art as career options, ultimately studying art at the Art Students League of New York; her sculptural focus on the body, flow and movement stems in part from this early interest in dance.
[Storm King Art Center. [''Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculpture and Drawings''], Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center, 1994. Retrieved March 22, 2022.]
Westerlund Roosen moved between New York and Toronto in the 1970s, balancing family life and a nascent art career, whose reputation she initially built through exhibitions in Canada.
[Zimmer, William]
"Restless Metaphors Breaching the Land and Consciousness,"
''The New York Times'', August 21, 1994. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Early highlights include solo shows at Willard Gallery, Leo Castelli, and Clocktower Productions, The Clocktower Gallery (all New York),
[Mellow, James]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''The New York Times'', February 16, 1974. Retrieved March 22, 2022.[Russell, John]
''The New York Times'', December 13, 1975, p. 17. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Sable-Castelli (Toronto), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
[White, Peter. "Mia Westerlund’s Pictorial Sculpture," ''Parachute'', Winter 1978, p. 36–9.][Baker, Kenneth]
"Canadian Art May Be in the Eye of the Beholder,"
''The New York Times'', December 11, 1983. Retrieved March 21, 2022. She also appeared in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and National Gallery of Canada.
[Tousley, Nancy]
"'Pluralities,' National Gallery of Canada,"
''Artforum'', December 1980, p. 83–84. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Work and reception
Art writers place Westerlund Roosen's work within a postminimalist tradition indebted to artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, which balances formal and associative concerns and emphasizes materials, surfaces and process, the body and sexuality, and qualities such as awkwardness and uncertainty.
[Artner, Alan G]
"Just Four Sculptures Make For a Full Show from Roosen,"
''Chicago Tribune'', January 25, 1991. Retrieved March 18, 2022. She has produced work ranging from drawings to small pedestal-based objects to monumental sculpture (indoor and outdoor), using materials including resin, felt, cast concrete, lead, copper, bronze, encaustic, ceramic and plaster.
[Braff, Phyllis]
''The New York Times'', January 30, 1983. Retrieved March 21, 2022.[Naves, Mari]
"Architectural Structures, With a Hint of the Surreal,"
''The New York Observer'', March 22, 2004. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
In the 1970s, she began adapting minimalist strategies to the exploration of expressive and erotic content, using pared down irregular, biomorphic forms.
Saul Ostrow described her work's development as "non-linear and non-developmental," with recurring motifs and shifts between non-referential and imagistic forms that often serve as synecdoches for the female body.
''Art in America'' critic Janet Koplos wrote that her work "captures sensation or gesture rather than image; the genius of her abstraction is that the forms convey physical feelings that viewers may internalize."
Early sculpture and ''Muro'' series
In her early career, Westerlund Roosen favored materials such as fabric, thread and polyester resin, often fashioned into draped and pleated wall or floor pieces.
In the mid-1970s, she produced her well-known ''Muro'' series, pouring concrete (and sometimes asphalt) to form thin horizontal slabs that became monolithic vertical surfaces when stood side by side or back to back.
[Storm King Art Center]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Artist. Retrieved March 18, 2022. They melded minimalist objecthood, aspects of monochromatic and shaped-canvas painting, and handmade, trowel-textured surfaces into a physicality that critics described as emotive,
"eloquent and august."
The ''Muro Series III'' (1977) consisted of massive concrete wedges separated by very narrow air spaces and embellished with caps of roofing copper or heavy plates of oxidized metal.
''Artforums Leo Rubinfien wrote that they appeared "at once flexible and stationary, playful and serene, suggesting a mingling of intellect and sensuality [and] a sense of having sprouted full-grown."
Biomorphic sculpture (1980–1996)
Critics identified a revitalization in Westerlund Roosen's work in the 1980s that turned from a more formalist and sublimated approach to an embrace of plasticity, figural forms, and modularity.
[McFadden, Sarah. "Mia Westerlund Roosen at Castelli Greene St.," ''Art in America'', Summer 1982, p. 143–4.] The work's more fleshy, visceral elements and evocative qualities extended its reach into a psychological realm that encompassed eroticism, humor, mystery, repulsion and dread.
''The New York Times'' suggested that the monumental scale and material transfigurations of her forms blurred their anatomical reference, creating an abstraction that recalled Georgia O'Keeffe and the Surrealism (art), Surrealist traditions of sexually suggestive or whimsical biomorphism (e.g., Jean Arp, Joan Miró).
[Karmel, Pepe]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''The New York Times'', April 19, 1996. Retrieved March 21, 2022.[Raynor, Vivien]
''The New York Times'', July 28, 1996. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Reviews in ''Art in America'' and ''ARTnews'', compared her 1982 show at Castelli to a natural history museum exhibition, with diverse, universal, and perhaps subconscious, forms suggesting fossilized fragments or objects sharing common origins in time or place.
[Baskin, Leonard. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," ''ARTnews'', 1982.] Playwright Edward Albee later wrote that her sculptures "seemed to have existed where they sit—wherever they sit—forever. They are truly prehistoric, and if there is a collective unconscious, then that is their domain."
Her figural pieces consisted of simple structures (ranging from 15' high to palm-sized)—hulks and surging or swelling, curved forms resembling gargantuan tusks, bones and body parts—with complex, varied surfaces covered in mottled, crusty "epidermises" of encaustic or lead.
Two sculptures were compared to works by Constantin Brâncuși, Brâncuși: ''Sleeping Beauty'' (1980)—a large, leaden arc with a sectioned spine, and ''Pompadour'' (1986), which consisted of two elephantine, limb-like forms, locked in an embrace.
''New York Times'' critic Grace Glueck wrote, the "ungainly but endearing [forms] invade and unsettle the viewer's grip on plausibility… Willful and enigmatic, these objects have considerable authority."
In later sculptures Westerlund Roosen employed repetition and seriality as a generative device suggesting formal mutation or mitosis.
[Brenson, Michael]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''The New York Times'', January 20, 1989. Retrieved March 22, 2022. She often layered or lined up large, irregular discs (''Olympia'', 1990) or planar, flange-like shapes, inviting organic associations with micro- and macro- or technological systems.
[Zimmer, William]
''The New York Times'', June 6, 1999. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Critic Vivien Raynor described the juxtaposition of minimalist shapes, biomorphic association, and hand-worked surfaces in ''Petal Peace I'' (seven bent forms recalling nestled tropical shapes or fungi) or ''Petal Piece II'' (stacked breast-like protuberances) as both disconcerting and reminiscent of the forms and humor of Isamu Noguchi.
Westerlund Roosen's SculptureCenter exhibition (1991) centered on ''American Beauties'': nine, back-to-back breast forms assembled into a 20-foot-long, low "machine" that Michael Brenson wrote, "suggested the blades of a sexual reaper, or a battalion of baby pacifiers, or a Stone Age chariot of wrathful fire" with a "comical but irrepressible force" of sisterhood.
''Promises Promises Promises'' (1991) employed eight upturned and parted, massive lips that were eerily sensual and ambiguous enough to be oral or vaginal.
Outdoor and earth works (1994– )
In the mid-1990s, Westerlund Roosen turned to site-specific outdoor and earth works, most significantly in a 1994 Storm King Art Center exhibition in which she sought to fuse object-making, large gesture and the earth.
[Phillips, Patricia C. "Signs of Imperfection," [''Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculpture and Drawings''], Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center, 1994. Retrieved March 22, 2022.] Several works incorporated trenches cut into the ground, modular organic and geometric forms, and hand-finished, skin-like surfaces.
The largest, ''Adam's Fault'' (1993–4), was an 80-foot-long trench whose side walls were studded with rows of boulder-like, concrete forms, reminiscent of a dig of partially excavated bones and (in title) the battle of the sexes.
''Bethlehem Slouch'' (1993) consisted of eleven rippled, overlapping sheets recalling gills or a supple spine, which she choreographed into an undulating wave emerging from the ground.
Her 1995 exhibition at Shoshana Wayne included the indoor earthwork, ''Madam Mao'', an enormous mound of earth (6' x 30' x 20' and 18 tons) that rose into a tapered peak crowned by a long, narrow, visceral cavity of pearly pink concrete evoking giant female genitalia.
[Auerbach, Lisa Anne]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''Artforum'', May 1995. Retrieved March 21, 2022. ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Susan Kandel termed it a tongue-in-cheek, monumental image of feminine "lack" that answered the "masculine posturing" of earth artists such as Michael Heizer.
In 2010, Westerlund Roosen displayed three 10-foot-tall, concrete and architectural foam works using curved elements on New York's Upper East Park Avenue: ''Baritone'', ''Juggler'', and ''French Kiss'', which conjoined comma-like forms evoking two tongues.
[Corbett, Rachel]
"Two Art Galleries Play Monopoly on Park Avenue,"
''Observer'', March 23, 2011. Retrieved March 22, 2022.[NYC Parks]
"Art in the Parks,"
Art. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Later sculpture (1999– )
In later work, Westerlund Roosen incorporated more varied approaches, revisiting the layered and stiffened cloth methods of her earlier sculpture, exploring expressive forms bearing Renaissance and Baroque influences, and producing both smaller, statuary-like pieces and sprawling arrangements of forms and lines.
[Johnson, Ken. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," ''The New York Times'', November 23, 2001. Retrieved March 21, 2022.][Harris, Susan]
''Mia Westerland Roosen''
New York: Betty Cuningham Gallery, 2006. Retrieved March 22, 2022. ''Parts and Pleasures'' (2002) was a pink-tinted concrete work consisting of large rippled disks, irregular balls, cylinders, and rope-like forms strewn across the floor, whose repetition and connection suggested a vaguely functional system that had rapidly dissipated. Janet Koplos interpreted the work's bursting of bounds, loss of control and release as a visualization of the "tension and dissolution" of a woman’s orgasm.
For her 2004 show, "Namesake," Westerlund Roosen exhibited five modestly scaled, abstract sculptures in poured concrete, each named for a historical or mythological woman—Althaea (mythology), Althea, Magdalena, Victoria, Clio, and ''Iris'', a calligraphic composition of tentacle-like tangles that emerged from two ovoid forms and activated interior, empty spaces.
[Golden, Deven]
"Mia Westerlund Roosen and Kim Jones,"
''The New York Sun'', March 1, 2004. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
In her felt and resin works, Westerlund Roosen departed from the more closed and monolithic cast concrete process, breaking up mass and volume and introducing a lyrical sense of openness and dynamism.
[Cohen, David]
"New Art on the Walls - and the Floor & Ceiling, Too,"
''The New York Sun'', September 20, 2006. Retrieved March 18, 2022. These expressive, somewhat ungainly works featured wavy flaps and curlicues of stiffened felt that cantilevered out from upright supports or trunks and seemed frozen in time and space (e.g., the ''Dervish'', ''Carmelite'' and ''Falls'' series, 2004–5).
She extended the expressivity of this work with a series of eccentric, assemblage-like, pedestal-based objects in the early 2010s, which were unified by bold hues of deep red, marigold and sky blue, then sealed with smooth, buffed wax (e.g., ''Blue Madonna'', ''Warts and All'', 2010).
[Valentine, Victoria L]
" Elegant Organic: Sculptures by Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
''Arts Observer'', June 26, 2012. Retrieved March 18, 2022.[''Romanov Grave'']
"Mia Westerlund Roosen,"
March 1, 2016. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
In the "Bridges" series (2014–5), Westerlund Roosen returned to the minimal, monolithic approaches of her early work, setting elementary, rectangular concrete forms atop one another in simple, rigorous compositions marked by uneven edges, rounded corners, bowed planes and visible imperfections that emphasized her creative process. Art historian Sidra Stich wrote that the series conveyed "a primal moment when art emerges as an evocative presence, resolute and personalized."
Awards and public collections
Westerlund Roosen has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2017), a Fulbright U.S. Scholar research grant (1996), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988–9) and Canada Council (1974).
[Ivey, Bill, Nancy Princenthal and Jennifer Dowley. ''A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment of the Arts'', New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.] Her work belongs to the public collections of the Albany Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada Council Art Bank,
[Canada Council for the Arts Art Bank]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Artist. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
National Gallery of Art,
[National Gallery of Art]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Collection. Retrieved March 18, 2022. National Gallery of Canada,
Neuberger Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum,
[Rhode Island School of Design Museum]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Collection. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Storm King Art Center,
[Farago, Jason]
"Storm King Reopens for the Art-Starved,"
''The New York Times'', July 9, 2020. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Vancouver Art Gallery, and Yale University Art Gallery,
[Yale University Art Gallery]
Mia Westerlund Roosen
Collection. Retrieved March 18, 2022. among others.
[Cuningham, Betty]
''Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculptures 1976-2012''
New York: Betty Cuningham, 2012. Retrieved March 21, 2022.
References
External links
Mia Westerlund Roosen Betty Cuningham Gallery
Oral history interview with Mia Westerlund Roosen Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2012
Mia Westerlund Roosen Storm King Art Center
Mia Westerlund Roosen Western Washington University Public Art
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roosen, Mia Westerlund
20th-century American women sculptors
21st-century American women sculptors
20th-century American sculptors
American abstract artists
American feminist artists
Sculptors from New York City
Art Students League of New York alumni
1942 births
Living people
21st-century American sculptors