Riffing on the favored themes of pleasure and play, Paint Balls (an ongoing series) explore a space for painting that is colored by both failure and potential. Building on years of paint-driven exploration, I use paint as practice, meditation, object, and environment. By pouring, drying, slicing, and wrapping layers of paint into brightly colored orbs reminiscent of fruit or balls, the layers transcend two dimensions and become sculptural, shedding the framework of the panel or wall mount. 

Akin to David Ireland’s Dumballs–concrete globs the artist made when he was out of ideas–Rosenberg makes her Paint Balls between projects from leftover, dried paint from the bottom of a can as their center. Imbued with humor and pathos, the balls elicit a continuum of the precariousness of life and the human condition. In a sense they become grounding, functional companions of the everyday, occupying multiple roles as bookends, door stops, touch stones, giving shape, meaning, and purpose to the in-between.

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P A I N T  /  B A L L  /  P O E M

These paintballs seem human – 

knobby knees 

                        & good humor      

despite poor odds.

Made to please 

& also to preserve: 

     A PB&J of color 

wrapped around a leftover core 

                      of paint scraped 

from the bottom of the can. 

Why paintballs?

Because of time. 

They inspire appetite

& alliteration:

      A picnic of pink paint brushes, 

      on a patched tablecloth, 

      making paintballs for all people!

      etc

No one can understand a paintball

better than anyone else.

All snobbery dissolves

in the presence of a paintball.

When I was young, my sister & I 

would once a year receive the astonishing

gift of a cone of bubblegum ice cream.

We would pull out all the gumballs

& save them on a napkin. 

                                   Sticky planets, 

enough to construct a whole universe.

I remember that feeling of absorbed happiness,

pulling out each one. Weighty Orbs,

& the idea of forever.

-Francesca Preston

The desire to find & give pleasure

is built in, it seems. Oh, paintball.

Scooch over & sit next to one

on a couch

or attempt to read the future 

in their opaque strata:

Either way, the paintball says

Yes

The Good in the World: a color for every day

Leah Rosenberg, The Good in the World: a color for every day. RITE Edition, San Francisco, 2017. 3-D color diary. Colored paper, wood and plexiglass. Edition of 20. 7 × 1.9 × 4.6". 365 pages. 

Each work comes with a Certificate of Authenticity and instructions on the use of the color diary.

"The matching game, or concentration, as it is sometimes called, is a popular card game played by children and adults around the world. Good memory is one of the qualities required in order to succeed in it. [Memory], however, is not enough.” Michael S . Paterson, 1992 

Make Me A Match grew out of a combination of several long-standing desires: to create a memory game, to cut perfect shapes out of poured paint sheets, and to explore methods of precisely printing stripes that have only ever been hand-painted. We are doing it all. The concept and creation of these pieces is a puzzle in itself. Make Me a Match consists of pairings and participation, contrasting colors and sentimental shapes. It involves wood and paint, printing and cutting, concentration and imagination, memory and mood, youthfulness and age. There are stools to sit on,  a tabletop to gather around. There are pieces to play with that can be held and moved around.  Others hang on the wall and–because of their contrasting colors and patterns– might appear to move. Together, these colorfully striped and marbled shapes and surfaces, make up an artwork that hopefully provokes a here and now kind of joy in us that has been there all along.

Carissa Potter and I collaborated on stitching a set of quilts for an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco about a concept of repair called Tikkun; a process of living consciously and changing the world for the better.

Together, we hand-stitched embellishments and comforting phrases with colorful thread; mending damaged quilts that were donated by Coyuchi 2nd Home Renewed™️—a circular initiative program designed to rehome imperfect products. Each quilt is one-of-a-kind and says something different; offering physical and mental comfort in an exceedingly imperfect and complicated moment in time.

In light of recent world events, we made the quilts available for sale with 100% of proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders to help bring the world back to a place of Tikkun. The hope was that these quilts would help keep you warm and feel loved. Our hope was that for every colorful stitch, peace ensues, twentyfold. And that by tending to something in need of repair, we will repair ourselves too.

Produced by TessutoEditions, 2021

Designed & Manufactured Exclusively for SFMOMA.

ORDER DIRECTLY THROUGH: https://museumstore.sfmoma.org

47" x 47" w/ hand-rolled edge
100% Silk
Made in ITALY

An interactive limited edition calendar encouraging daily contemplation and celebration. Each day of the year is marked by a confetto (a single confetti) in a unique hue, designed to be popped out and collected in the pocketto (a single pocket:)

A record of days passed and others to come. The colorful circles accumulate until the year comes to a close when they can be quietly contemplated or tossed triumphantly at the stroke of midnight.

10.25” x 12” (folded); 19” x 12” (open)

Designed with Lisa Mishima, printed with Solstice Press

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Every Day Confetti Calendar, 2O21

Interactive temporal sculpture

Perforated paper, custom pencil, translucent plexiglass box. When some days pass in the blink of an eye and others feel like so much is happening at once it is hard to see anything beyond the hour in front of you, this limited edition calendar encourages daily contemplation and celebration. Each day of the year is marked by one oversized confetti in a unique hue, designed to be popped out in the morning and inscribed with a memory, impression, or wish every evening using the custom pencil.

Placed in the translucent accompanying box, the colorful circles accumulate until the year comes to a close when they can be quietly contemplated or tossed triumphantly at the stroke of midnight. Signed and numbered by the artist.

This series of objects was created with the idea that they could be keep at one's front door or on one's desk...a place where they are meant to function as both a container (for your phone while it is charging, so you don’t have to look at it) and a pedestal (for something of meaning collected from your day out in the world...a flower, a seashell, a note). The hope is that when you go to retrieve your phone from the box, you are reminded of the meaningful moment. It is a simple gesture, to pivot your attention in an effort to improve your day in a small way. The dimensions of the box (8.5 x 4.25 x 7.25 inches each) are in reference to the negative spaces in the series of (Another Language) drawings...what happens in the pauses. The breaks in the marks made on the boxes are moments of interruptions to the process, by my own distractions and incoming notifications, which are recorded on the Certificate of Color accompanying each of the twenty eight boxes in the series.

Window Boxes, 2019, colored pencil on wood, 8.5 x 4.25 x 7.25 in

Petel Design was founded by Julie and Ibrahima Wagne in 2012.

Julie and Ibrahima met in Mauritania when Julie was in the Peace Corps and Ibrahima was teaching in the capital city of Nouakchott. Julie was eventually placed in Ibrahima’s home village and they fell in love and soon moved to San Francisco.

Petel means “little spark” in Fulani, the tribal language of the Mauritanian weavers they work with. Petel is a partnership between artists, designers, and weavers in West Africa and San Francisco. Their mission is to fund education and training for Mauritanian children and youth through the sale of products made from traditional Fulani textiles.

All images by Airyka Rockefeller photography

Each day, while in residence in Italy, I colored in a sheet of paper with a single colored pencil. My process of color collecting is typically quite deliberate; going out into the landscape, with the intention of gathering colors of landmarks I encounter. The colors vary depending on time of day, the season, architecture, light, and conversations overheard. I had a system, but felt beholden to it.

My time in Italy was a break from the norm, so I used it as an opportunity to approach my color collecting in a different way. I wanted more poetry to the process, to meander and happen upon the color. I worried less about an audience and thought more about my own intuition around color. I turn to it like some people might go to church.

I filled the pages following a set of simple principles. The breaks in the drawings, like a wall with missing bricks, mark the moment when the pencil is sharpened. I saved the stumps and the shavings; a glimpse into the process. I worked horizontally left to right, then right to left, like a farmer planting her rows. Standing at a table, looking out the open window of my studio to the olive trees, my pencil markings in time with an incessant cicada song. I listened to Italian conversation as much as I could, thinking it could work its way into the titles. What resulted was Another Language.