Jun 6, 2024–Apr 27, 2027

Marking the first time the space has been activated in this way since the building’s opening, Bay Area artist Leah Rosenberg transforms The CJM’s Yud Gallery through light and color, creating a welcoming environment for visitors to reflect, rest, and wonder. InWhen One Sees a Rainbow Rosenberg fills the gallery—a space itself created to celebrate light and its connection to Judaism—with new hues, exploring how the wondrous natural phenomenon of rainbows connects to our lives, light, and meditative practice. Inspired by the Jewish tradition of reciting a blessing upon seeing a rainbow, visitors will also be invited to create their own responses to the colors on view in the gallery. Enter a kaleidoscopic world of color and rediscover a familiar symbol of hope and awe.

Day break, sunsets, moonrise, mottled leaves, coastal oak trees. Sand dunes, tidepools, ocean caves, volcanic rock, breaking waves. These are some of the moments throughout San Luis Obispo County that artist Leah Rosenberg found inspiration in for the collection of forty-one colors for her mural SLO(W) Rainbow on the exterior museum walls in March 2023. For Rosenberg, this exhibition is a return to the museum and this palette; bringing the colors from the outside in. She returns to and reorders this collection of colors with ritualistic tendency, and by doing so, offers a specific and timely story of this place and a lasting connection to San Luis Obispo.

Rosenberg serves us a forcefield of carefully chosen colors in multitude of ways: through the mural wrapping the four exterior walls of the museum, then inside the gallery walls through a “rainbow” oil painting and a series of watercolors with a meandering horizon line. With respect to the history of indigenous mark-making in the region, Rosenberg uses the building, the site of the Museum, as her due north and the colors as her guide. Her poignant relationship with color seeks to help people in building a muscle for moving through the world as a color collector too.

How do these colors make us feel? Can we take them with us? Do they stay with us? Can we become these colors by paying special and deep attention to them? How do they inform us about what is happening in and to the landscape that surrounds us each day? Can slowing down to know these colors help us show more tenderness to each other?

This exhibition was a complement to Rosenberg's 2023-2024 mural project with SLOMA, SLO(W) Rainbow, which spanned the museum's exterior walls.

The enduringly relevant practices of Bay Area friends and sometime collaborators Susan O'Malley (born 1976, San Jose: died 2015, Berkeley) and Leah Rosenberg (born 1979, Ann Arbor, Michigan) reflect a deep, almost radical optimism. Whether through text, color, or daily rituals, their work is characterized by a belief in art's ability to affect people's lives for the better.

O'Malley made work rooted in social practice, ranging in scale from buttons to billboards. To gather the texts for Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self (2015), the main body of work presented in the adjacent space, she stopped passersby on the streets of Berkeley and asked: "Imagine you had the opportunity to time travel and meet yourself at eighty, to sit down and have a cup of tea with your eighty-year-old self. You muster the courage to ask her for advice.... What does she tell you? The sixteen screenprints that resulted from this project reflect her participants inner wisdom, reminding them of things that, deep down, they already knew.

The work in this space consists of relics from a residency at irving Street Projects, in San Francisco's Sunset District, that Rosenberg was slated to begin a week before O'Malley's tragic and untimely passing at the age of thirty-eight. Rosenberg's project, titled Everyday, a Color (2015), became a way of processing grief "one day at a time*-a phrase from one of O'Malley's Advice prints.

During her walks near the ocean, Rosenberg "collected colors and painted them, one by one, layer upon layer, on the gallery walls. furniture, and objects seen here. The first color she painted was hot pink, for Susan.

10 Quilts For Comfort made w/ Carissa Potter of People I've Loved for the exhibition "TIKKUN: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves" at The Contemporary Jewish Museum. This exhibition showcased artworks and editions of 30 Bay Area–based contemporary artists, all drawing from the Jewish concept of “tikkun,” (Hebrew for “to repair”) to explore pathways towards togetherness and processing of our current realities and future possibilities, as we continue to wrestle with heightened political, ideological, and social divisions.

Carissa and I have worked as collaborators on several projects and exhibitions, since meeting 10 years ago by way of a dessert napkin. While the form and context of our collaborations can vary, we approach each project with a consistent curiosity in color + care (for oneself, one another and others), a great appetite for keeping our plates full + spinning, and a shared genuine belief that making art is a means of weathering our emotional ups + downs. The analog slow work of stitching this collection of cotton quilts had healing side effects, like a conversation with a close friend, or staying warm under the covers for a little bit longer.

Customized with colorful sentimental stitches, this edition of ten queen-sized (88 x 92 inch) organic cotton quilts were part of The Dorothy Saxe Invitational, with proceeds benefitting the artists and The CJM’s mission + exhibition programming w/ a percentage of quilt sales going to FiberShed , a non-profit organization that develops equity-focused regional and land regenerating natural fiber and dye systems…which also brings a sense of comfort.

For every stitch a thank you: this project would not be without the generous donation of quilts from Coyuchi 2nd Home Renewed™️—a circular initiative program designed to keep textiles out of landfills and rehome imperfect product. Thank you!
To curators Arianne Geraldin@moygramsHeidi Rabben, & cjm fetching facilitators (Henna Vainio you are a wedge wonder) and @impart.photo for documentation.

“He drew a circle that shut me out—Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him in!”

Rosenberg’s practice to date usually involves initiating art experiences through site-specific installations, layers of acrylic paint, public art activations, and food, and so these paintings mark a dramatic shift. The artist abandons her usual hard lines and distinct layers for a brushier and more imperfect approach that embraces the seduction and mercurial nature of paint itself. In oil painting terminology, “light over dark” refers to layering semi-transparent light colors over dark colors to create an illuminating effect. While this is not a guiding principle in these paintings, the idea of light overcoming darkness is imbued in the making of them. Their hand-painted shapes and blended-together hues make the works about motion, activation, being alive. Their colors, the artist notes, tell us something about who they are.

In the paintings, an imperfect and irregular circle, most often within a perfect square, is both a metaphor and a recurring compositional element. The circle as a symbol—for the infinite, the whole, the total, the self—has echoed throughout Rosenberg’s practice, but here she engages it as a device in service of her constant courtship with abstraction, paint, color, and form. She likens the undertaking to Jasper Johns’s flag paintings or Susan Rothenberg’s horse paintings. In Rothenberg’s words: “The horse was just something that happened on both sides of my line. The image held the space and the line kept the picture flat.” (New York Magazine, 1976)

Rosenberg’s practice spans painting, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and food, and focuses in particular on the role of color in our lives—its emotional and psychological impact. What began as making paintings led to making cakes, which led to layering paint on an ever-larger scale, which led to making work for an audience and projects involving ideas around sharing and giving. The question of whether an artwork can be generous is an ongoing inquiry. With these new paintings, that question is still present, and the answer is still enthusiastically “yes,” but the concept has shifted from that of an unexpected exchange of a physical gift to more abstract ideas of social exchange and aesthetic contemplation. Abstraction is generous by nature, Rosenberg believes, because it creates the opportunity for “moments to stop and look and connect with what resonates for us.” Rosenberg’s paintings meet the viewer where they are at, and ask for neither more nor less.

Rosenberg has been exhibited extensively throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally. She has been a recipient of the Irvine Fellowship through the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the Kala Fellowship at Kala Art Institute. Rosenberg has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Project 387, Facebook, Google, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and McColl Center for Art + Innovation and the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence program. In 2019, she was invited to talk about the language of color for TEDxSan Francisco. Her work is also held in private collections in the US and abroad.

As the second artist-in-residence of the Dickinson Visual Arts Endowment, Rosenberg employed a wide variety of media to explore the many ways color is insinuated in the human experience, including painting, installation, sculpture, video and even food.

The Dickinson Visual Arts Endowment was created in 2021 to support Harker’s visual arts programs and students, as well as deepen the school’s connection to the wider international arts community.

Rosenberg worked in tandem with Harker School Art Club and the school's Visual Arts department to develop Stripe Club, the community offshoot Rosenberg's exhibition “If Time Were a Color,” which includes the large mural in the Rothschild Performing Arts Center (RPAC). The mural’s layers of paint correspond to overlooked everyday moments, such as the muted greens in the landscaping or the yellow of honeybees.

“[Large scale installation] appeals to me because it can be experienced by many,” Rosenberg said. “It doesn’t have to just be looked at. If you’re there with [the art], you’re as much part of [the message] as it is. The art is always evolving when people are [interacting] with it.”

Read more about If Time Were A Color and Stripe Club in this article by Harker students.

In a twist of fate that only the dump could provide, I found components from a past project in the pile while scavenging. The rounds and the dowel pieces used in this installation were discarded wooden cake stands, each constructed and painted a color specifically for the SFMOMA Birthday Bash in 2017, a one night event with the theme “monochrome.” For the exhibition at Recology, a year and a half later, I repurposed the rounds, using them as canvases for poured paint works and transformed the dowels into teetering sculptures.

I was able to scavenge and reuse forty of the original eighty stands. In he Hebrew Bible, the number forty appears frequently as a marker of time— forty days or forty years—separating two distinct epochs. This number also represents generational time, as it often takes forty years for a new generation to arise.

Paint used in all the works is from the Household Hazardous Waste Program. Each one of the forty stripes on the wall is the result of all the colors that appear in the corresponding Marble Round mixed together. There were eight Stick Stacks, composed of segments painted in the forty colors. The tallest tower (165”) references the studio—turned gallery— where the work was made and is the distance from the concrete floor to the center wood beam.

The Artist in Residence (AIR) Program at Recology SF is a unique art and education program that provides Bay Area artists with access to discarded materials, a stipend, and a large studio space at the Recology San Francisco Transfer Station. By supporting artists who work with recycled materials, Recology hopes to encourage people to conserve natural resources and promote new ways of thinking about art and the environment.

Hodges Taylor is pleased to present, To Open Eyes, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Leah Rosenberg, who returns to Charlotte after her recent McColl Center for Art + Innovation residency (2017). A survey of drawings, sculptures, and prints made while in residence in Italy over the summer offers a refreshing commentary on recording through color and repetitive mark-making.

A devoted “color collector”, Rosenberg’s use of the medium creates a dialogue between viewer and artist, time and place. While many of Rosenberg’s prior projects involve public engagement or site-specific installation, the work presented in this exhibition stems from the artist’s instinct to return to a solitary studio practice, influenced by color theorist, teacher, and artist, Josef Albers (1888-1976). The exhibition title references Albers’ fundamental lesson: to teach his students to see beyond; to see what is overlooked; and to open their eyes in order to see the things we encounter in our everyday environment with new significance.

Through a residency this past summer in Tuscany, Rosenberg set out to create a practice predicated on ritual and discipline. By following a predetermined plan, the works on paper and cultural objects presented speak to the process of making as a way to stop, and start to see from a different perspective. Together, they form a record of the artist’s self-directed process, like journal entries, on her meditative journey. Rosenberg, like the ever-influential Albers, encourages us to slow down, unplug, open up, and trust the process more than the end result.

Exhibition catalog: LEAH ROSENBERG: TO OPEN EYES

For the month of September, San Francisco-based artist Leah Rosenberg will be creating a site-specific, accumulative installation in the Kenderdine Art Gallery.

An sequel to 'Everyday A Color' in 2015 at Irving Street Projects in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco, 'Everyday A Colour' is set in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (her hometown).  Leah will paint directly on the gallery walls, working with a new paint hue selected from around Saskatoon, daily, over the course of one month. Each day Leah will add paint in a shape that references the local agricultural mappings, gradually creating a low relief mural. The process of layering is a performative, durational and gestural act, navigating her meditations on place. The literal piling up of colours and paint materials will evolve to create an archive of her everyday.

Click on + (top right corner of each image) to learn about the name and source for the colours.

Artists Susan O’Malley (1976-2015) and Leah Rosenberg (b. 1979) met at Romer Young Gallery ten years ago, where O’Malley’s exhibition My Healing Garden Is Green was on view. This first encounter was the beginning of many thoughtful, engaging, and generous collaborations and conversations between the artists, both in O’Malley’s lifetime and beyond.

We’ve Been Here Before presents—through text, color, and daily rituals—the parallel play of these two Bay Area artists and their ongoing mutual belief in art’s ability to affect people’s lives for the better. The show stages an exploration of time not in the conventional Western sense as a linear continuum of successive moments, but in terms of repetition, continuance, inclusivity, generosity, reflexivity, and, perhaps most importantly, presence.

This exhibition features  a series of text pieces from O’Malley’s 2009 exhibition at the gallery, You Are Exactly Where You Need to Be, previously unshown ephemera from her San José Artist-in-Residence series, and a single small drawing that reads, in black script,  a red hot rose. O’Malley found inspiration in the crisp and authoritative language of optimism. By inviting the viewer to just be, she invites an active participation. Ultimately, her heartfelt, sometimes humorous, always fiercely compassionate calls to action celebrate our collective humanity and a collective need for healing.

Rosenberg’s conceptual paintings and process-based drawings, reflect O’Malley’s generosity and invite their own experience of openness.  Rosenberg’s 2008 large-scale striped diptych, All Together Now, is made up of margins of consecutive paint layers, one laid over the next as days or weeks pass. For Rosenberg, paint serves as a medium for layering, duration and accrual, recording boundaries of time spent dedicated to a particular process.  The series Moments in Time, made in 2022, offers a fresh commentary on recording through color and repetitive mark-making. The pieces speak to a practice predicated on ritual and discipline; of making as a way to stop and start to see from a different perspective. Together, they form a record of the artist’s self-directed process, like journal entries, on her meditative journey.

The works by O’Malley and Rosenberg on view were selected for their complementarity in terms of repetition—of idea, of gesture, of action—and encouragement of interpersonal connection. The show suggests a return to the time when the works were made, the return of visitors to the space, and brings O’Malley, in a way, back to the gallery to share in the occasion of collectivity. The work is the same, but with a different resonance now.

We’ve Been Here Before is ultimately a prompt to notice where we’ve been, an acknowledgment of our collective resilience, an invitation to be where we are, and an encouragement to continue.

Leah Rosenberg: Color for the People

McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC
September 14–December 2, 2017

The San Francisco–based artist-baker Leah Rosenberg inaugurated McColl Center's project space with Color for the People, a site-specific exploration of color and taste.

Rosenberg’s process begins with a daily routine of observing colors outdoors and capturing them with her smartphone camera. Each week, she selected a color from Charlotte’s landscape and applied it to the gallery walls and furniture to create an immersive color-field painting and meditative space. To deepen visitors’ sensory engagement with her project, Rosenberg hosted a series of “Color Bar” events over the course of her residency: on selected Thursday evenings, she served cocktails and treats to match the color of the week, encouraging the public to reflect on the relationships between experiences of color, flavor, and people.

Rosenberg’s influences include the artist and pioneering color theorist Josef Albers. A German refugee who fled Nazi occupation and immigrated to the United States, Albers taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1933 to 1949, and his teachings on color became metaphors for life. “In an age in which increased human sensibility has become such an obvious need in all areas of human involvement, color sensitivity and awareness can constitute a major weapon against forces of insensitivity and brutalization,” said Albers. His art was about human relationships as much as it was about aesthetics. [1] Today, amid growing social tensions and extreme xenophobia, Rosenberg’s Color for the People intended tocreate space for remembering the vital roles that color (and food) continue to play in shaping our consciousness and in fostering shared experiences of pleasure and joy, which are, as Rosenberg says, “medicine for times like these.”

The  /  in Mono / Chromatic presents the work of Tammi Campbell and Leah Rosenberg who have been in conversation for over a decade about paint, process and practice. 

Campbell and Rosenberg have seemingly disparate art practices, yet have shared paint as a common motivation and material.   In this two-person exhibition, Rosenberg focuses on color, time and sequence in three suites of prints.  Serendipitous overlaps occur in the inclusion of drop cloths and white paint stacks.

The interplay between their works is more of a subtle and possibly playful nod to one another, rather than a direct response. For example, Campbell’s tarp reflects an unexpected insertion of blue into her work, similarly Rosenberg’s all white paint stack moves away from her trademark use of colours. Both artists have also employed the gestural act of folding and stacking paint, thus drawing aesthetic links to their processes.

To Freeze the Shifting Phantasmagoria, curated by Kelly Lindner, investigates the diverse strategies emerging in contemporary painting. Highlighting work by five California artists (Emily Davis Adams, Lisa Adams, Yoon Lee, Kara Maria, and Leah Rosenberg) the exhibition reveals an energized proliferation of an age-old media that has been influenced by digital technology, the history of abstraction, installation art, as well as social and political concerns.

*For this exhibition, “What Goes Around”, made while in residence at Recology in 2019, was reinstalled with the remaining paint mixed. The colored square that the marble round is installed is the resulting color when those marble colors are fully mixed. Documentation by Jason Halley.

Chance of Rain, (a sequel to their 2016 show at Legion Shop, Hours in the Sun) artists and frequent collaborators, Carissa + Leah, continue to consider the weather, its impact on the world as a whole and on our mood as we move through it. They turn to some parameters to make the work mean something to others, to make things with generous spirit while also making sure to take care of themselves and each other in the process. The set of four striped and marble seating stations titled “Protective Paintings” incorporate the eight colors used in the Lüscher Color Test, a quiz developed by Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher in 1947 that supposedly determines your psychological profile based on which hues you love and which you do not.  Acting as emotional forecasters, artists Leah Rosenberg and Carissa Potter will weather the storm by making soft gestures of self care. Humans have been working on systems of understanding and predicting the future for, well, a while. Leah and Carissa will work on harvesting data from their own emotional ups and own to predict and possibly change the outcome of the future though color, form, material and care.

The 2018 Agility Projects will mark the third year of this innovative series of exhibits by local artists. Featured artists are selected by BAC’s curatorial committee from a list nominated by esteemed Bay Area arts professionals. Participating artists receive commission stipends, funds for materials, support from a preparator, photo documentation of their work, the publication of an exhibition catalog; and professional development support.

This year’s Agility Projects artists are Leah Rosenberg and Jeremiah Jenkins. Rosenberg is a San Francisco-based artist whose practice spans a range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking and performance. Color and process play a primary role in her practice. She recently completed a large scale wall installation at the San Francisco International Airport and published the Color Collector's Handbook with Chronicle Books.  Jenkins creates sculptures, installations and performative work, whose humor and social resonance stem from a unique understanding of materials. As he states “I think of myself as a reverse anthropologist. I make artifacts that reflect our society on a physical and conceptual level.”

Appro-propagation, curated by Mayumi Hamanaka features new work by 2015-2016 Kala Fellowship artists. The exhibition includes Takuji Hamanaka, Jamil Hellu, Lucy Puls, Ronny Quevedo, Neil Rivas, Leah Rosenberg, James Voller, and Christine Wong Yap. Kala Fellowships are awarded annually to a group of innovative artists working in printmaking, photography, book arts, installation, video and digital media. 

Leah Rosenberg’s practice spans a range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and food. During her residency at Kala, she created Color Separation (a 108 layer paint stack referencing Kala’s individual studio space and 108 silkscreen prints of those paint sheets) and Opportunities for Growth (a fifty layered screen print). Her work explores how color, form, flavor and arrangements affect human emotion through the process of accrual and layers, personifying how our experiences and memories accumulate. 

With endless gratitude to Kala, in particular Archana Horsting, Yuzo Nakano, Carrie Hott, Paper Buck, Ben Engle, Andrea Voinot, and Mayumi Hamanaka; Kevin B. Chen and Genevieve Quick (jurors);  Gary (install); photographers Sean (Jiajun Wang) and Ryan Whelan for documentation; Susan O’Malley (still inspiring me, especially here); Christine Wong Yap and Carissa Potter for continued collaboration.

I had the pleasure of spending two weeks at Project 387, a project-based artist residency located on 150 acres in Mendocino County. The theme for this year was around the idea of “Place” and it was fascinating to hear about the various ways in which the seven other residents  share the unique ways in which they approached this theme whether over discussions around the dinner table, in their evening artist talk or presenting their work Open Studios on the last day of our stay.  Thank-you to Allyson Feeney, her family and board for your hospitality and support.  You can read interviews with the artists here. 

For the month of April, Carissa Potter Carlson and Leah Rosenberg are collaborating with the sun. Three mornings each week, the two artists spend time in the sun, generating work around the prescription of sunlight. The recordings, findings and artworks that evolve from this ritual will make up this two-person show at Legion.

Leah Rosenberg closely aligns art and life through her interdisciplinary practice, utilizing paint – both the act of painting, and the material of paint – to document time and place. The notion of generosity simultaneously emerges in her work, as she investigates how to employ colour to elicit and share experiences that may otherwise be intangible. Mining through the layers and stripes of paint, what can be revealed is an archive of moments, intimately linking her process to the everyday. Mono / Chromatic continues Rosenberg’s ten-year examination on the affects of colour. In Everyday, A Colour, the site-specific installation has formed as a visual document of her daily encounters in Saskatoon. Originally from Saskatoon, Everyday, A Colour reflects re-visited places from Rosenberg’s childhood, while she also considers larger frameworks, such as the rapidly changing cityscape, and local Modernist painting histories. She has recorded her immediate surroundings by a adding a new layer of coloured paint to the walls, each day, for thirty consecutive days, building up to create an immersive (yet temporal) installation. Comprised of geometric forms created by masking off of areas, what has emerged is a visual map, loosely representing the topographic geography of Saskatchewan. Photos and video by Matt Ramage at Studio D.

View the thirty colours with their reference HERE.

Pro Arts presents Where Once Was None, a 2 x 2 Solos exhibition by Leah Rosenberg, curated by Rhiannon MacFadyen.

For 2 x 2 Solos, Leah Rosenberg displays the remnants of her experience in residence at Irving Street Projects earlier this year. Sheets of paint derived from a progressive installation are framed and hung reflective of how they were in the original space. A table and chair, thick with coats of latex paint, sit in the center of the gallery. What was once an ephemeral performance, is transformed into large-scale art objects, displayed with all their layers, cracks, tears and failures. Rosenberg’s installation reminds us to experience delight when things fall apart – that life, time, loss, flaws, accidents, are ingredients to also create something out of nothing and to create joy where there once was none.  Photos thanks to Matt Shapiro.

Finding Your Center is a self-help audio tour and distributed sculptural installation that playfully responds to our quest for calm, balance, and equilibrium in the face of the demands of modern life. Using color, voice, shape, and sound—and responding to the unique architectural features of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts—Susan O’Malley and Leah Rosenberg lead visitors through the exhibition spaces in search of an elusive center that is both physical and internal.

The project begins at the central pillar in YBCA’s anteroom and includes three additional locations in and around the galleries of the ground floor. Using a bright color palette designed to induce feelings of harmony, Rosenberg responds to the building’s repetition of the classic column shape by highlighting existing cylindrical forms as well as suggesting new ones. An edition of round colored stools, which visitors can use to rest and reflect, accompanies her installation. O’Malley’s audio tour refers to and engages with Rosenberg’s painted sculptural elements. As the affable tour guide narrator, she interweaves positive affirmations with moments for self-reflection and gentle prompts for listeners to engage with the exhibition environment in ways that inspire calm.

Finding Your Center is conceived in dialogue with Montalvo Arts Center’s current multi-year theme about health and wellness entitled Flourish: Artists Explore Wellbeing and is envisioned as a site-specific response to the decentralizing impulse of BAN7. Consistent with Montalvo’s commitment to fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, the project features partnerships with San Francisco-based writer Christina Amini, Bay Area industrial designer Benjamin Laramie, and Seattle-based composer Tiffany Lin. Much of this project was conceived and developed by the artists while in residence at the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Art Center.

– Donna Conwell, Curator, Montalvo Arts Center.

 A progressive installation created from colors directly observed in the Outer Sunset. Each day she is in residence at Irving Street Projects, Leah will select a color pulled from the palette she encounters throughout the neighborhood, leaving behind a stripe of the previous day's hues. She will paint a new layer of color every evening before leaving for the day, one on top of the last, arriving the next day to a freshly painted studio. In the end, a site specific low-relief mural will be revealed.

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, 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.  Other works hang on the wall and–because of their contrasting colors and patterns– might appear to move. With a focus on simple forms such as lines and circles, curves and squares, these colorfully striped and marbled shapes and surfaces make up a space that hopefully provokes a here and now kind of joy in us that has been there all along.

Photos by Airyka Rockefeller Photography, 2023

A site-specific wall work, installed at M-Rad Architecture's new space in Culver City, using 15" x 30" and 15" x 15" painted birch panels.  Patterns were collected from scenes seen from then inside of the space looking out.  The yellow stripes on the side of the Metro, street lines at the intersection, the tricolor Public Storage unit across the street.

Finding ways to connect to the community in Omaha through color and food over the course of 100 days as an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for the Future of Food, a thematic residency in 2015. Projects included Chromaha and Color Bar.

Chromaha, a playful title for a 100 day-long project and a nod to the city where it took place. During my time there, I found and documented colors from experiences, things or places: the yellow awning of a candy store, green peppers from the garden, a hot pink ribbon tied to a tree. For each daily color, I wrote a coinciding line of to add to what would become a 100 line poem. It acts as the title for the piece and as a guide for people to take out into the city to discover those colors throughout their days. In conjunction with these daily musings and color gathering, I would head to the local hardware store to buy paint in the corresponding hues that I needed. The colors were applied to the one hundred panels in succession; each new color building on the following panel. The final panel includes layers of all one hundred colors. The act of accretion—building of layers from one piece to the next—became a meditative activity, void of the intuition and act of gathering color entails. Painting as an action became my daily mantra.

A site-specific color-based installation at The Mill on Divisidero Street in San Francisco, where delicious loaves of bread are baked and sold by the cart full.  Taking cues from the herringbone tile pattern and the dimensions of the shelving installed for merchandise.  For details, click here.

I had never been to Vermont before. 

It was mid-November, and outside the snow was falling. It blanketed the ground in bright white that seemed to perfectly match the freshly painted walls of my studio, a studio that would be mine for only thirty days. Thirty precious days. And this was the first. 

The Vermont Studio Center does this all year long, batches of 50 artists, writers, and musicians, descending for one month at a time. In between, there’s barely enough time to wipe the walls of each studio clean. 

I looked at the wall. Beneath the primer, I knew, were the colors of the artist before me. And beneath that, another cake of white, followed by another artist’s colors. And then white, and color, and white, and color, and on and on. 

If I could reveal all those colors, I thought, I would know this place. I would know the people that created before me. It would be like studying the rings of tree. 

Dinnertime. On my way to the dining hall, I noticed a single blade of bright green grass poking out of the snow. That will be today’s color, I thought. Green grass.  

The director of the program welcomed us with a guided meditation, which surprised me. I was here for art, not well-being. I was still learning that those things are one in the same, at least for me. Maybe, if you’re reading this, for you too. 

In the days that followed, I made a practice of surveying the landscape around my studio on foot. I tried to bring that spirit of awareness, that attention to the world, that meditation embodies. Every day, I chose one color– one color I’d found out in the real world that for some reason struck a chord within me: silver for melting icicles, deep red for a barn, pale yellow for a sun-bleached window awning.

Color is more complicated than most people think. It is full of information that speaks directly to us. Every object’s color has countless variations – color changes with the light, with age, with our mood. By reducing something to a single color, you distill it to a very specific essence and edit out the rest. That essence, which you discovered, doesn’t just capture something special about the thing. It captures something special about you and how you experience the world. 

Click on each image to see the name of that day's color.

Spectrum is an experimental installation that embeds the independent work of three artists—Jackson Petty, Leah Rosenberg, and Nathan Skiles— within the "context of installations of visual and thematic patterns created by each artist," says exhibit coordinator Nathan Skiles. The works include new paintings and a textual wall installation by Petty, multicolored paint forms/sculpture and a striped wall work evoking remembered color by Rosenberg, with new collages and a large-scale vinyl wall application by Skiles. 
"While each of us looks to visual and logical patterns for inspiration and context, Jackson's fascination with language and brain games evokes a playful antagonism between the structure of the game and the agency of the player," says Stiles. "Leah engages the complex workings of human emotion and the pursuit of happiness through color, form, flavor and arrangement, and I mine traditional arts and crafts to find lingering and vestigial meaning laying dormant and hiding in plain sight."

Sarasota resident Nathan Skiles graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design (Fine Arts) and Montclair State University (Studio Art) and exhibits his work at galleries and arts centers around the country. For his most recent series, "Will the Circle be Unbroken," his work incorporates a range of symbolic motifs to create a repository for diverse elements to co-exist and cross-contaminate in open-ended relationships. Info:www.nathanskiles.com.

A graduate of Ringing College of Art and Design, Jackson Ray Petty lives and works in Los Angeles. His artwork explores the potentiality of intention, often by referencing widely recognized systems, such as puzzle games, and exploiting the physicality of materials. Info: www.jacksonraypetty.com.

Using painting, sculpture, installation and pastry, San Francisco resident Leah Rosenberg explores how color, form, flavor and arrangements affect human emotion. Info:www.leahrosenberg.com.

Through existing works and new commissions, artists Susan O’Malley (San Jose), Leah Rosenberg (San Francisco), and Christine Wong Yap (New York) explore the age-old question: How do we cultivate happiness?

Wong Yap’s series of texts sewn from ribbons and installed directly on the gallery wall convey messages encouraging positive mental habits, while a new large-scale drawing diagrams the interconnections between theories of subjective wellbeing. Rosenberg explores how color, light and material impact our sense of contentment. Inspired by the use of light as a therapy for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), she invites gallery visitors to stand in front of her Illuminated Stripe Works, a series of small striped light boxes, and alleviate negative emotion. O’Malley has created a space in the gallery and invites visitors to experiment with various happiness-inducing activities, testing out the benefits of talking and listening to one another, and allowing time to relax. By transforming the gallery, O’Malley, Rosenberg and Wong Yap also examine the role of aesthetic pleasure in inspiring positive emotion.

The works in the gallery are distributed among two rooms—one blue and one grey. Works in the grey room imply that contentment spans a complex spectrum of emotions and conditions and suggest that positivity and pleasure may not be the only paths to happiness. Wong Yap’s MegaPentimento, conceived as a pair with MegaPennant, is a layered set of flags with varying arrangements of tints. The overlapping layers create darker opaque hues, signifying that happiness can encompass a range of interrelated mental states. Rosenberg’s Paint Streamers simultaneously express joy, celebration, decay, and failure as the once-abundant pile of twisted paint deteriorates and collapses over time. The work suggests that we often over-emphasize the importance of euphoric happiness; only by experiencing sadness and negative emotion can we demonstrate resilience and access the full richness of the human condition.

—Donna Conwell, curator

Curated by Donna Conwell, Happiness Is…  January 25 through May 31, 2013 at Montalvo Arts Center Project Space Gallery, Saratoga, California.

Projects supported by Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Arts Center

My practice spans a range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, and cake. Central to my work is an ongoing fascination with the complex workings of human emotion and the pursuit of happiness through color, form, flavor and arrangement. I have experimented with methods of accumulation and removal that hide and reveal at the same time, requiring viewers/participants to think about the act of ‘consuming’ art in unexpected ways. The stripes on the paintings are the edges of consecutive layers, one laid over the next as days or weeks pass. In some works, the layers of paint are freed from any support--liquid color is poured into pastry trays, and, once dried, peeled of, a flexible, fondant-like sheet. Some of these are stacked into teetering piles, becoming object rather than image, while others are used as a kind of wrapping, turning anything (everything?) into a gift. This new body of work considers the notion of pairings and what it means for two things to go together. I use cut sheets of poured paint to wrap around sticks, frames, paintings and paint itself. The result is an awkward and imperfect object with bulges and uneven edges that become highlighted in contrast to the clean, even, flat stripe paintings. When two striped paintings are hung on the wall next to each other, a conversation is implied. When a paint wrapped stick holds up a sheet of paint against the wall, a relationship is suggested. I like the idea that a color can stand in for a flavor or a feeling and that paint can stand in as a character or prop and that by pairing these layered objects in a show, a story unfolds. 

Please visit Galleri Urbane for more information

For Feast:  The Art of Playing with Your Food, the outdoor clay studio at the New Children's Museum in San Diego is transformed into a festive environment mimicking a professional bakery and cake shop, creating a space  and offering "recipes" for visitors follow "recipes" and use a custom two-side baking tools to sculpt clay “treats” out of clay and offer them as gifts or display them in the "pastry case". 

Components to  two-sided "baking tools" were made in collaboration with Yvonne Mouser, a a San Francisco based artist, designer, and builder engaged in creative practice that spans furniture design, product, spaces, fine art, and events.  Feast - the art of playing with your food, is a bakeshop-inspired art studio that mimics a professional bakery, where visitors can experiment with the tools to sculpt "treats" out of clay and offer them as gifts.  Four different two-sided tools were made by hand in sets of ten including: a rolling pin / stamp, spoon / spatula, cone form / hole punch, and a comb / pastry scraper. 

Black & White Projects (formerly ASC Projects) is pleased to launch it’s new identity with an exhibition in full color. Leah Rosenberg: Color and Scalepresents works from the artist’s recent residencies at Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts and Kala Art Institute, as well as a special project in dialogue with the vintage industrial scale — an interior remnant from the buildings historic industrial felt factory days.

Leah Rosenberg’s paired paintings evidence a hope in systems, but frustrate the typical progression or resolution that systematic processes imply. Horoscopes are based on maps of the cosmos that are interpreted by astrologers; these readings offer ways to understand one’s personal characteristics, or to imagine one’s future. The horoscope texts refer to calendrical time, which is stable in its structure but varies according to planetary movement. As a way to cope with uncertainty, they mirror Rosenberg’s daily practice of working in the basement studio, painting stripes; the simple gouache lines on paper provide a reliable structure wherein experimentation with colors and their sequence might occur.

 The stripes are also a kind of calendar: a registration of time and effort. They are an index of days and experiences, each color inspired by friends’ clothes and shared meals, or bits of conversations overheard. The colors repeat from painting to painting, sometimes in similar order but most often not, much like one’s daily life. Geometric perfection is clearly never the goal. Rather, the paintings paradoxically embody the potential for endless variety within a set form, which is perhaps another way to understand the astrological clippings, as well. Rosenberg’s work shows an optimistic belief in open-ended yet precise language, and in shifting yet durable forms.

-Courtney Dailey, 2010

Photos by Blair Heagerty, 2010

Horoscopes excerpts adapted and amended from Holiday Mathis for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

Present tense: Leah Rosenberg’s Fresh Paint

Holy smokes! Looks like some sort of guest-host relationship to me.

—Laurie Anderson

Cakes and paintings have more in common than might meet the eye (or the mouth, as the case may be). Both, for example, can embody pleasure, sharing, or even celebration. In both, time accrues in the form of layers—though, in paintings, often all we see is what’s on top, while cakes’ interiors are revealed in the very act of consumption.

In paintings, sculpture and installations often involving cake, Leah Rosenberg has experimented with methods of accumulation and removal that hide and reveal at the same time, requiring viewers/participants to think about the act of ‘consuming’ art in unexpected ways. The stripes on her paintings are the margins of consecutive layers, one laid over the next as days or weeks pass. In other works, membranes of color freed from any support are stacked into teetering piles or rolled into bundles, becoming objects rather than images. Rosenberg makes these flexible, fondant-like sheets by drying poured paint in stacks of shallow trays, the presence of which gives her studio a kitchen-like ambiance.  Some sheets become a kind of wrapping, turning anything (everything?) into a gift.

But we are not talking, strictly speaking, of a gift economy here. There is no quid pro quo involved in eating Rosenberg’s cakes. It’s more like xenia, the guest-host relationship described over and over in Homer’s Odyssey—hospitality freely given to the traveling stranger (Rosenberg, raised in Canada, knows first hand about long sojourns in foreign lands), for which the return is more karmic than monetary, more about welcoming generosity than any return of equal value. Although, in a way, what altruists keep secret from the rest of the world is the kind of pleasure and satisfaction that giving itself provides for some-- a thrill that can only be imagined by those of us driven by other impulses. 

Also central to understanding the way Rosenberg’s ideas operate in a not-always-hospitable world is the idea of something 'looking good enough to eat,' and what that really means, when you think about it. Her experiments with festive tableware; with homemade confetti (remnants of paint sheets patiently punched into tiny circles); with cake on the wall (like a painting) and cake on a pedestal (like sculpture) and with paint itself, stacked like multiple layers of frosting, are all reminders that cake is not, strictly speaking, a food, but the embodiment of a ritualized giving. Are we guests, when we look at art in the usual fashion, as visitors to galleries or museums? Or are we just consumers, who will end up in the gift shop, buying postcards to fill our hunger for something to take home, to own?  And if art involves cake, are we satisfied?  Is looking at art an experience of celebration, an experience of consumption, or an occasion for gift-giving (or receiving)?

For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.—Alfred Hitchcock

The commercial gallery is an ideal site for the exploration of this complicated relationship between art and life, giver and receiver, pitcher and catcher, host and guest. Most of us go to such places mostly to look, but if a certain percentage of visitors don’t come away with a commodity paid for in money, the gallery must eventually close its doors. All guests are welcomed (though only some, into the back room. As with the layers of color buried within Rosenberg’s canvases, a lot remains hidden). By slicing and serving cake, she both confronts that transactional anxiety that gallery-goers often feel and at the same time makes it clear that there are ways in which the artist can take control of the situation in which (s)he is so often powerless.

And what about those swags of mouth-watering color, cascading from the wall, or hanging on nails like clothes or towels?  When is painting just paint?  When is art really just life? Can either of these ever be true, if the place in which we meet them declares their identity to be something else? Freshness is a quality idolized in the art world. It is possible, then, that there is a tiny private joke being made here, at the expense of that cult-of-the-new, as we are reminded how ‘fresh’ is also a descriptor used in conjunction with appetizing, just out of the oven, delicious, while ‘paint’ is not—in any situation that I can conceive of—edible.

In the end, the cakes Rosenberg makes and serves can be understood as Proustian madeleines, invoking ritual foods eaten at seders or Christmas dinners, each one freshly-made, but composed of uncountable layers of time, shared beliefs or feelings.  Though the deeply satisfying layers of her paintings and sculptures can be consumed without caloric guilt, they too are reminders of Lewis Hyde’s injunction that  “the gift must always move--” that celebration literally means to engage in ceremonies of rejoicing, respect, festivity: sharing pleasure and affection, understanding and fun.  That, in other words, the roles of guest and host are interchangeable, if we want them to be. Let us all eat cake.

Maria Porges