Mia Westerlund Roosen (born 1942) is an American sculptor known for largely abstract, often monumental works that reference the body, eroticism, and primal forms.Koplos, Janet. "Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon, Weinberg," Art in America, May 2002.Cohen, David. "Mia Westerlund Roosen at Lennon, Weinerg," The New York Sun, March 18, 2004. Retrieved March 18, 2022.Kandel, Susan. "Restoring Ceremony to the Experience," Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1995. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
Westerlund Roosen emerged as a sculptor during the male-dominated ascendancy of minimalism, and was one of a handful of women represented by renowned art dealer Leo Castelli in the 1970s and 1980s.Borum, Jenifer P. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," Artforum, January 1992, p. 105–6. Retrieved March 21, 2022.Wei, Lilly. "Beauties and Beasts: A Conversation with Mia Westerlund Roosen," Sculpture, September 1, 2014. Retrieved March 18, 2022.Rubinfien, Leo. "Mia Westerlund, Castelli Gallery", Artforum, September 1977, p. 79–80. Retrieved March 22, 2022.Butler, Sharon. "Jerry Saltz’s special request," Two Coats of Paint, June 1, 2009. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Critics such as Saul Ostrow and Lilly Wei characterize her art as postminimalist and feminist-influenced, noting its privileging of organic form, handmade processes and surfaces, and evocative possibilities.Ostrow, Saul. "Mia Westerlund Roosen's Studies, 1972–2012: Surface, Structure, and Form in Scale," Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculptures 1976-2012, New York: Betty Cuningham, 2012. Retrieved March 21, 2022.Brenson, Michael. "'American Beauties': Images of Softness Rendered in Concrete," The New York Times, March 15, 1991, p. C26. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Wei placed Westerlund Roosen among a pioneering group of women that "breached the barricades of Minimalism," individually producing work whose "distinctive, even eccentric forms and wide range of materials served as a rebuttal to the rational geometries, serialization, coolness, and crushing industrial scale" of that movement.
Westerlund Roosen has had solo exhibitions at the Castelli Gallery, New Museum,Glueck, Grace. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," The New York Times, March 8, 1985. Retrieved March 22, 2022. and Storm King Art Center,Prince, Kathy. "Mia Westerlund," Vanguard, October 1978.Goodman, Jonathan. "Mia Westerlund Roosen: The Storm King Art Center," ARTnews, December 1994, p. 142. and appeared in shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Karmel, Pepe. "The Stuff of Dreams and the Natural World," The New York Times, January 5, 1996. Retrieved March 21, 2022. Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal,Stich, Sidra. "Bridges and Grays," Mia Westerlund Roosen, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, Hopkins Center for the Arts, 2016. Retrieved March 21, 2022. and SculptureCenter, among others. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Fellows. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Anonymous Was A Woman Award,Anonymous Was a Woman. "Awards 2017." Retrieved March 18, 2022. and Fulbright grant.Fulbright. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Grantees. Retrieved March 18, 2022. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Collection. Retrieved March 18, 2022. National Gallery of Canada,National Gallery of Canada. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Artist. Retrieved March 18, 2022. and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others.Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Person. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
She lives and works in New York City and Buskirk, New York.
Early life and career Westerlund Roosen was born in New York City in 1942, and her early life was divided between there and Cuba. She lived in Toronto between 1964 and 1976.Raynor, Vivien. "Large Sculptures of Pale Presence," The New York Times, September 3, 1989. Retrieved March 22, 2022. She considered both dance and art as career options, ultimately studying art at the Art Students League of New York; her sculptural focus on the body, flow and movement stems in part from this early interest in dance.Storm King Art Center. [Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculpture and Drawings], Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center, 1994. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Westerlund Roosen moved between New York and Toronto in the 1970s, balancing family life and a nascent art career, whose reputation she initially built through exhibitions in Canada.Zimmer, William. "Restless Metaphors Breaching the Land and Consciousness," The New York Times, August 21, 1994. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Early highlights include solo shows at Willard Gallery, Leo Castelli, and The Clocktower Gallery (all New York),Mellow, James. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," The New York Times, February 16, 1974. Retrieved March 22, 2022.Russell, John. "Mia Westerlund," The New York Times, December 13, 1975, p. 17. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Sable-Castelli (Toronto), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.White, Peter. "Mia Westerlund’s Pictorial Sculpture," Parachute, Winter 1978, p. 36–9.Baker, Kenneth. "Canadian Art May Be in the Eye of the Beholder," The New York Times, December 11, 1983. Retrieved March 21, 2022. She also appeared in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and National Gallery of Canada.Tousley, Nancy. "'Pluralities,' National Gallery of Canada," Artforum, December 1980, p. 83–84. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Work and reception
Art writers place Westerlund Roosen's work within a postminimalist tradition indebted to artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, which balances formal and associative concerns and emphasizes materials, surfaces and process, the body and sexuality, and qualities such as awkwardness and uncertainty.Artner, Alan G. "Just Four Sculptures Make For a Full Show from Roosen," Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1991. Retrieved March 18, 2022. She has produced work ranging from drawings to small pedestal-based objects to monumental sculpture (indoor and outdoor), using materials including resin, felt, cast concrete, lead, copper, bronze, encaustic, ceramic and plaster.Braff, Phyllis. "Drawings That Impress, Not Only for Size," The New York Times, January 30, 1983. Retrieved March 21, 2022.Naves, Mario "Architectural Structures, With a Hint of the Surreal," The New York Observer, March 22, 2004. Retrieved March 18, 2022.
In the 1970s, she began adapting minimalist strategies to the exploration of expressive and erotic content, using pared down irregular, biomorphic forms. Saul Ostrow described her work's development as "non-linear and non-developmental," with recurring motifs and shifts between non-referential and imagistic forms that often serve as synecdoches for the female body. Art in America critic Janet Koplos wrote that her work "captures sensation or gesture rather than image; the genius of her abstraction is that the forms convey physical feelings that viewers may internalize."
Early sculpture and Muro series In her early career, Westerlund Roosen favored materials such as fabric, thread and polyester resin, often fashioned into draped and pleated wall or floor pieces. In the mid-1970s, she produced her well-known Muro series, pouring concrete (and sometimes asphalt) to form thin horizontal slabs that became monolithic vertical surfaces when stood side by side or back to back.Storm King Art Center. Mia Westerlund Roosen, Artist. Retrieved March 18, 2022. They melded minimalist objecthood, aspects of monochromatic and shaped-canvas painting, and handmade, trowel-textured surfaces into a physicality that critics described as emotive, "eloquent and august." The Muro Series III (1977) consisted of massive concrete wedges separated by very narrow air spaces and embellished with caps of roofing copper or heavy plates of oxidized metal. Artforum'''s Leo Rubinfien wrote that they appeared "at once flexible and stationary, playful and serene, suggesting a mingling of intellect and sensuality [and] a sense of having sprouted full-grown."
Biomorphic sculpture (1980–1996) Critics identified a revitalization in Westerlund Roosen's work in the 1980s that turned from a more formalist and sublimated approach to an embrace of plasticity, figural forms, and modularity.McFadden, Sarah. "Mia Westerlund Roosen at Castelli Greene St.," Art in America, Summer 1982, p. 143–4. The work's more fleshy, visceral elements and evocative qualities extended its reach into a psychological realm that encompassed eroticism, humor, mystery, repulsion and dread. The New York Times suggested that the monumental scale and material transfigurations of her forms blurred their anatomical reference, creating an abstraction that recalled Georgia O'Keeffe and the Surrealist traditions of sexually suggestive or whimsical biomorphism (e.g., Jean Arp, Joan Miró).Karmel, Pepe. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," The New York Times, April 19, 1996. Retrieved March 21, 2022.Raynor, Vivien. "A Sculpture Show With Butterflies," The New York Times, July 28, 1996. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
Reviews in Art in America and ARTnews, compared her 1982 show at Castelli to a natural history museum exhibition, with diverse, universal, and perhaps subconscious, forms suggesting fossilized fragments or objects sharing common origins in time or place.Baskin, Leonard. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," ARTnews, 1982. Playwright Edward Albee later wrote that her sculptures "seemed to have existed where they sit—wherever they sit—forever. They are truly prehistoric, and if there is a collective unconscious, then that is their domain." Her figural pieces consisted of simple structures (ranging from 15' high to palm-sized)—hulks and surging or swelling, curved forms resembling gargantuan tusks, bones and body parts—with complex, varied surfaces covered in mottled, crusty "epidermises" of encaustic or lead. Two sculptures were compared to works by Brâncuși: Sleeping Beauty (1980)—a large, leaden arc with a sectioned spine, and Pompadour (1986), which consisted of two elephantine, limb-like forms, locked in an embrace. New York Times critic Grace Glueck wrote, the "ungainly but endearing [forms] invade and unsettle the viewer's grip on plausibility… Willful and enigmatic, these objects have considerable authority."
In later sculptures Westerlund Roosen employed repetition and seriality as a generative device suggesting formal mutation or mitosis.Brenson, Michael. "Mia Westerlund Roosen," The New York Times, January 20, 1989. Retrieved March 22, 2022. She often layered or lined up large, irregular discs (Olympia, 1990) or planar, flange-like shapes, inviting organic associations with micro- and macro- or technological systems.Zimmer, William. "Wax as a Medium and a Message," The New York Times, June 6, 1999. Retrieved March 22, 2022. Critic Vivien Raynor described the juxtaposition of minimalist shapes, biomorphic association, and hand-worked surfaces in Petal Peace I (seven bent forms recalling nestled tropical shapes or fungi) or Petal Piece II (stacked breast-like protuberances) as both disconcerting and reminiscent of the forms and humor of Isamu Noguchi. Westerlund Roosen's SculptureCenter exhibition (1991) centered on American Beauties: nine, back-to-back breast forms assembled into a 20-foot-long, low "machine" that Michael Brenson wrote, "suggested the blades of a sexual reaper, or a battalion of baby pacifiers, or a Stone Age chariot of wrathful fire" with a "comical but irrepressible force" of sisterhood. Promises Promises Promises (1991) employed eight upturned and parted, massive lips that were eerily sensual and ambiguous enough to be oral or vaginal.
Outdoor and earth works (1994– )