The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will showcase the first major survey of Annabeth Rosen’s work. In “Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped” more than two decades of her practice will be exhibited. The exhibition will feature the arc of Rosen’s ceramic sculptures as well as drawings that mirror the trajectory of these works.

For over 20 years, Annabeth Rosen has interrogated the place of craft in the contemporary art landscape. Formally trained in ceramics yet heavily influenced by painting, Rosen has molded her practice around conceptually-driven sculptural forms. While Rosen’s earlier works engaged first traditional ceramic forms conjuring landscape and nature, her more recent works push past ideas of representations of the physical realm and into dialogues around material performance and endurance.

Exploring the temporal nature of ceramics, Rosen melds the performative into both material and process. Composed through laborious, additive techniques, she pushes the medium beyond spectacle and into conversations about endurance-based performance, feminist thought, contemporary painting, and conceptual art. The artist rarely attempts to obscure her hand as a primary instrument and often “binds” multitudes of discrete works to create multifarious objects, sometimes diminutive and occasionally monumental.

Read the College of Letters and Science overview of the exhibition and Rosen’s career here with links to videos of her talking about her art and process.