USF Contemporary Art Museum is Pleased to Present "James Rosenquist: Tampa"
James Rosenquist, Tampa to New York 1188, 1974-75. Published by Graphicstudio, University of South Florida Collection
Renowned Pop artist James Rosenquist, who passed away earlier this year, lived and worked in the Tampa Bay area for more than four decades. Throughout his life, Rosenquist maintained a very active and generous profile within the creative community of Florida's west coast. From November 13th through December 9th, 2017, the USF Contemporary Art Museum will celebrate this creative and collaborative legacy with the exhibition James Rosenquist: Tampa. Drawn primarily from the collection at USF, the exhibition will feature editions of Rosenquist prints produced at USF's print atelier Graphicstudio. Additionally, the exhibition will include works from private collections, drawings and support materials, and prints produced at three Tampa Bay area ateliers: Flatstone Studio, Pyramid Arts, Ltd. and Topaz Editions.
James Rosenquist: Tampa is curated by Peter Foe; organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 鈥� March 31, 2017) became well known in the 1960s
as a leading American Pop artist alongside contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein,
Claes Oldenburg, and other figurative artists. As with his contemporaries, Rosenquist's
background in commercial art deeply influenced his nascent fine-art career and radically
changed the face of the art world and the annals of art history. While each Pop artist
developed a distinct style, there were commonalities in their approaches to image-making
that helped define the Pop art movement in the early 1960s: the use of commercial
art techniques, and the depiction of popular imagery and everyday objects. Rosenquist
was never comfortable being characterized as a Pop artist.
Drawing on his early experience as a billboard painter, Rosenquist culled imagery from print advertisements, photographs, and popular periodicals and recombined these to create mysterious and bold compositions. Utilizing the visual language of advertising, described by the late American curator Walter Hopps as "visual poetry," his work has provoked questions ranging from the economic, romantic, and ecological to the scientific, cosmic and existential. Creating seminal new work over more than five decades, Rosenquist consistently expressed facile talent in painting, collage, drawing, and printmaking. His work is included in major public and private institutions, and has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, The Menil Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Denver Art Museum, Tretiakov Gallery, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, and other international institutions.
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