Martha Rosler

An accomplished writer and artist, Martha Rosler has used text, video, and photography in her work to critique widely held assumptions about culture, identity, and human nature. In one of her best known works, the 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler is shown displaying and pantomiming various kitchen utensils and their uses. The tools, which are introduced in alphabetical order, include knives, ladles, bowls, and other common goods. She coolly displays each piece, though her demonstrations are sometimes violent and unusual—using the knife, for instance, to make stabbing rather than chopping motions.

Rosler is a pioneering feminist artist. Much of her early career was spent in Southern California, and she attended graduate school at UC San Diego. At that time California had an unusual, countercultural art scene that differed greatly from New York, and her work fit well with the unruly experimentalism that emerged during that time. On moving to New York in 1980, Rosler’s interest in language and representation found new subjects, such as the poverty of the Bowery and the visibility of war.

She has also written criticism and theory texts for several publications. Much of this material was collected and reprinted in her 2013 book, Culture Class.

Rosler’s work has been shown in prominent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dia Art Foundation, and the New Museum. A 2005 traveling show of Rosler’s expansive book collection was shown as a public library and was exhibited across Europe and the United States, including the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the United Nations Plaza School, and the Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2006 Oskar Kokoschka Prize, and an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.