Rosen's chosen subjects, animals wild and tame, are used as vehicles to explore their instincts and natural intelligence. For Rosen, understanding animal nature is the key to understanding human nature. Much of her work concerns capturing a moment when an animal is caught in the act of looking or doing; these creatures have an intention, but how aware are they of themselves and their actions? Rosen’s work subtly and elegantly poses this question. Rosen is fascinated with cultures like the Inuits, Native Americans, and Egyptians. For these groups, art was a by-product of an investigation of being and mortality rather than an aesthetic pursuit. She cites not only these cultures but Renaissance masters like Michaelangelo and da Vinci as influences. Like these artists, Rosen excels across several different mediums, including sculpture, painting, and drawing. Traces of all three can be found in each; upon close observation, a sculpture has been painted, or a drawing has had several layers of wax sculpted onto its surface.
Rosen was born in New York City, where she grew up and began her career as an artist. Despite finding early success in galleries and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to San Gregorio, California, on the coast south of San Francisco, where she keeps her studio and resides on a horse ranch frequently visited by the birds and mammals you see in her work.
Rosen has been selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion on several occasions in their Annual Invitational in New York, a prestigious exhibition juried by some of the greatest artists of our time; she was awarded the Purchase Award in 2010. Other distinctions include the Full Award in Sculpture from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980) and the Full Award in Sculpture from CAPS (1982); Rosen also received the Madein/Luso American Foundation Grant (1988). A masterful and sought after teacher, Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions, including the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, Lacoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News. Her work has been exhibited across the United States. It is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. An upcoming solo retrospective will open next year at the Bakersfield Art Museum, as will an invitational group exhibition of sculptors to be held next summer at The Church, in Sag Harbor, NY. Jane Rosen’s monograph, Dual Nature, was published by Pointed Leaf Press in 2021.
