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Rose Marasco

Rose Marasco

Medium photography

Website http://www.rosemarasco.com

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Rose Marasco is a prolific photographer and an award-winning educator. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Southern Maine. Marasco began the photography program at USM where she taught for 35 years. Prior to coming to Maine, Marasco initiated and taught for 5 years, the photography program at the School of Art, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in her hometown— Utica, NY. Marasco is currently finalizing work on a book of photographs and text entitled, At Home: Photography, History, and Me. It is a memoir and meditation on the history of photography from one of New England’s most respected artists. The book features short personal writings on topics ranging from artist’s residencies and iPhone photography, to the early death of her father, and includes selections from several bodies of work from Marasco’s long career. Shifting fluidly between images and texts, the artist shares the evolution of her artistic process, interrogates key moments in photography’s development, and invites readers to explore their own creativity. The Foreword, by esteemed historian, Lucy Lippard, situates Marasco as a key feminist voice among practitioners of vernacular photography. The confluence of past and present embedded in Marasco’s own home—a Greek Revival style residence she purchased in 2003—prompted uncanny connections to the artist’s life and provides the armature for this book-length exploration of how domestic spaces and objects carry meaning across time.Responding to an early draft of her book project in 2019, critic John Yau, in Hyperallergic, observed Marasco’s gift for capturing unexpected meaning from her subjects and he remarked, “The juxtaposition opens a speculative space, where history, anonymity, language, preservation, loss, and the passage of time are collapsed into a symbol to be deciphered and contemplated — with traces of tenderness, pain, and beauty to be found everywhere we look.”In 2015, Marasco had a career retrospective entitled, index at the Portland Museum of Art. The exhibition, with full catalogue, was nationally featured and reviewed in HyperallergicThe New York Times, The Boston Globe, American Photo Magazine, Downeast Magazine, and numerous regional publications throughout New England.  In 2018, index travelled to the Munson Williams Proctor Art Museum. In addition to this major exhibition, Marasco has had significant solo shows at, the Houston Center for Photography, Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France, three solo shows at the Sarah Morthland Gallery NYC, at Meredith Ward Fine Art NYC, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, and The Farnsworth Museum of Art. In total, she has mounted twenty-three solo exhibitions and has participated in sixty-three group exhibitions. Her photographs are included in public collections of distinction including at: The Fogg Museum at Harvard University; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection; The Davis Museum at Wellesley College; The New York Public Library Photography Collection; The Portland Museum of Art; The Bowdoin College Museum of Art; Colby College of Art; Bates Museum of Art; and, the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, among many others. She has lectured about her work at Harvard University, Parsons School of Design, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and numerous other colleges and museums across the country. Marasco has a B.F.A. from Syracuse University and a M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York where she studied with Nathan and Joan Lyons.