UMBRIA.- The Poor Farm and BB Trust House will launch a biennial exhibition program with work by artist Kay Rosen titled We Have a Synching Feeling in the Italian Hilltown of Monte Castello di Vibio (PG), Umbria, Italy.
Rosen’s exhibition expands on her decades-long investigation into the structure, sound, and social dimensions of language.
Installed throughout several domicile dwellings in the medieval hill town, Rosen’s exhibition will be in a regional conversation with the work and the environments initiated by Sol LeWitt, Brian O’Doherty, Mel Bochner, and Richard Tuttle, conceptualists who developed artistic practices and visual vocabularies in response to Umbrian cultural history and its physical environment.
For over six decades, Rosen has explored the potential of linguistic form—its denotations, connotations, and visual possibilities—through paintings, drawings, wall works, collages, and editions. Employing visual, grammatical, and typographical strategies such as color, scale, and geometry, she invites acts of reading, misreading, and rereading. Her works distort and subvert linguistic norms, revealing how words communicate and miscommunicate, and how meaning slips between syntax and structure.
Kay Rosen (b. 1943, Corpus Christi, TX) recently presented her first major European solo exhibition, Kay Rosen: NOW AND THEN, at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen (2023–24). In 2021, she was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., to create SORRY, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the museum’s East Building. Her mid-career survey Kay Rosen: Li[f]eli[k]e, curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers, was jointly exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art and Design (1998). Other solo presentations include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Grazer Kunstverein (Graz); Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney); the Art Institute of Chicago; Dunedin Public Art Gallery (New Zealand); the Drawing Center (New York); MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, MA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); and Witte de With (Rotterdam). Rosen participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and 2000. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants, an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, and the SJ Weiler Fund Award. Rosen’s work is held in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and Collection Lambert (Avignon). Rosen taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years. She lives and works in New York City and Gary, Indiana.
A publication featuring essays by Michelle Grabner, Mary Jane Jacob, and Robin Waart will accompany the exhibition.
The POOR FARM (est. 2008) is an exhibition, residency, and publishing program located in Little Wolf, Wisconsin. The POOR FARM is a 501 (c)(3). Major exhibitions by Sky Hopinka, Gretchen Bender, Guillaume Leblon, Lucio Pozzi, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Félix González-Torres and other international artists have been featured in year-long presentations and publications.
The MCdV Project @ The BB Trust House is an evolving program of exhibitions, residencies and events fostering an engagement by artists, writers and curators with the medieval hill town where it is located and the surrounding landscape.
