Bio:
Art Rosenbaum, born in 1938 in Ogdensburg, NY, is a painter, muralist, and illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. He earned his AB in Art History and his MFA in Painting at Columbia University and has worked in France on a Fulbright in Painting; he also held a Fulbright Senior Professorship in Germany. Among his exhibitions were the New Orleans Triennial and the Corcoran’s 41st Biennial of American Painting, and his works are in many collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Columbus (GA) Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art. His solo show in 2000 at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York was reviewed in Art in America. The Liverpool (UK) College of Art and Design presented a solo show of his work as part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. A major retrospective “Weaving His Art on Golden Looms: Paintings and Drawings by Art Rosenbaum” was mounted at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2006. He has executed mural commissions at the UCLA School of Law, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Russell Special Collections Library, both at the University of Georgia. He has taught studio art at the University of Iowa and the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he was named the first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts.
His folk music field work in the South and Midwest has resulted in over 14 documentary recordings, several of which are on Smithsonian-Folkways. His boxed set, released on Dust-to-Digital, Art of Field Recording Vol. I: Fifty Years of American Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum won a Grammy for Best Documentary Recording in 2008. He wrote and illustrated Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (1983), and Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition on the Coast of Georgia (1998), both published by the University of Georgia Press; his study, The Mary Lomax Ballad Book: America’s Great 21st Century Traditional Singer was published in 2013. A performer on a variety of folk instruments, he has appeared at numerous folk festivals both solo and with groups like the present-day Skillet Lickers, has cut three banjo/vocal LPs and CDs, and has written and illustrated three instruction books on traditional banjo styles.
Publications:
Field work in the South, the Midwest, and beyond has resulted in three scholarly books authored by Art as well as over 14 annotated LPs and CDs. The boxed set Art of Field Recording Vol. I: Fifty Years of American Traditional Music, on Dust-to-Digital, won a Grammy for Best Documentary Recording in 2008. He has also written three instruction books on old-time banjo. Over the years four LPs and CDs featuring Art’s own playing and singing have been released.
Weaving His Art on Golden Looms: Paintings and Drawings by Art Rosenbaum
This catalog accompanied Art Rosenbaum’s first major retrospective exhibition in 2006 at the Georgia Museum of Art, curated by Dennis Harper, with essays by Harper and Paul Manoguerra, Curator of American Art. There are also entries by Willilam Underwood Eiland, Director of the Museum, and Len Jenkin, playwright and novelist. The catalog is illustrated with 51 full-color images of the entire checklist of paintings, drawings and prints from 1953 through 2005. The title comes from a poem by self-taught artist, Reverend Howard Finster:
“Art Rosenbaum has a lot of fun
Playing his banjow [sic] in different tunes
weaving his art on golden looms.”
Recommendations
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The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).