"I think of language almost like these little found objects that sort of suggest themselves to me. Sometimes I don't really go looking for them as much as they're just there.”
Kay Rosen was born in 1943 in Corpus Christi, TX. She received her BA in Linguistics, Spanish, and French from Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1965. She attended graduate school for Linguistics and Spanish at Northwestern University, then taught Spanish at Indiana University in Gary. While teaching in Gary, Rosen began taking studio art courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rosen’s works span in size from mural to laptop-sized. They are largely text-based, employing formalism, linguistics, and humor to reveal content hidden in the structural nature of written language. Many of her works are representations of words in which certain letters have been juxtaposed or rendered in different colors or scales in order to reveal hidden messages or to draw attention to the relationship between language and meaning. Rosen's work often utilizes wit and humor and frequently veers into commentary on the U.S. political condition.
Rosen's works have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Rosen has also received several awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, the Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work (College Art Association), the S.J. Weiler Fund Award, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants.
Rosen currently lives between Gary, IN and New York, NY and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.