Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, public art
Website: leahrosenberg.com
Leah Rosenberg was born in 1979 in Saskatchewan, Canada, and has lived and worked in San Francisco since completing her MFA. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC in 2003, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2008, where she wrote her thesis on the artistic possibilities of cake. After graduate school she worked for four years as the head pastry chef at SFMOMA’s Blue Bottle Rooftop Café, creating desserts inspired by the colors of the museum’s special exhibitions — a project she developed in collaboration with author Caitlin Freeman (who documented it in the book Modern Art Desserts). In 2017 she was Creative Director for Color Factory in San Francisco and New York. She published The Color Collector’s Handbook with Chronicle Books in 2018. Her permanent public commission Everywhere A Color (2018) is installed in the International Terminal of San Francisco International Airport. Her work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA.
Rosenberg works in painting, installation, site-specific wall works, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and food, with color as the single organizing principle of everything she makes. Her practice is rooted in the belief that color is inseparable from memory, emotion, and lived experience, and that the act of slowing down to observe, match, and share a specific color is itself a meaningful form of social connection. Her process-driven wall installations — such as Getting Better Everyday a Color (2021) at SFMOMA, in which she rolled a new color onto the wall every day for fifty days, masking off a three-inch stripe of the previous day’s color each time — create physical archives of duration, documenting time through accumulated layers. The resulting works are at once rigorously minimalist and deeply personal. Her SFMOMA installation embedded messages of self-care between each layer — compiled by her late friend and collaborator Susan O’Malley, who died at 38 in 2015 — making the minimalist form a site of grief and tenderness.
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