Allan Rosenbaum
Substratum
November 4 – November 26, 2023

Substratum presents a series of sculptures featuring meticulously modeled and painted surfaces and inset areas of fabric collage and felted wool. Celebrating materiality and a remixing of the personal and the public, the work in the show probes relationships between craft, painting, and sculpture, while addressing issues of invention, memory, and restoration. For this show, Rosenbaum draws inspiration from a collection of neckties inherited from his father as well as scrap from family sewing projects. His abstract constructions develop visual conversations between personal material and material he has collected representing diverse histories and geographies. His palette includes quilting scraps, Dutch wax fabrics, vintage kimonos, and deadstock fabric sourced from donations, estate sales, and the virtual marketplace. Using curiosity as a guide, the exhibition is a quest for new forms and the alchemy that can occur when materials and processes are brought together in the search for the unexpected.

About the Artist:

Allan Rosenbaum is a studio artist and former Professor of Ceramics at Virginia Commonwealth University. Rosenbaum’s practice is materially based and utilizes a range of analogue processes to investigate intersections between craft, art, and design. Rosenbaum has received Individual Artist Fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts in both Craft and Sculpture, three early-career project grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and he is a fellow of the Virginia Center for Creative Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in public collections including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Taipei Yingge Ceramics Museum; the City Museum of Varazdin, Croatia; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts; Madison Art Center in Wisconsin; the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art and the Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama; the City of Richmond Public Art Commission; and the Kamm Teapot Foundation.