Martha Rosler

(American, born 1943)

Roadside Ambush, from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-1972)
Photomontage, C-print, edition 2/10, 20 × 24 inches

Gladiators, from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (2004)
Photomontage, C-print, edition 4/10, 20 × 24 inches

Rosler’s highly political and humorously subversive art focuses on how various socioeconomics and political ideologies govern American life.

Martha Rosler works in a wide range of media including video, photography, installation, performance, and photomontage. She is also a prolific writer of art criticism and theory. Rosler’s highly political and humorously subversive art focuses on how various socioeconomics and political ideologies govern American life. Rosler has continued to critique capitalism, gender politics, war, and violence throughout her career from a postmodern, conceptual art tradition with an emphasis on feminism, civil rights, and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Rosler’s series of photomontages Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-1972) began during the height of the Vietnam War and was revisited in 2004 as a response to the Iraq War. This didactic series juxtaposes the horrors of wars fought abroad within the setting of comfortable middle-class American domestic life. Rosler appropriates documentary images of the two wars into collages with advertisements from printed popular culture media, such as Life magazine. The series pushes the viewer to question the relationships between journalism, advertising, violence, politics and sexism, as well as the relationship between war and consumer culture. When seen together, the two bodies of work from this series emphasize the similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq wars and the consistency of American politics as well as the optimism of the artist for the possibility of social and political change.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York and received her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965. She received her M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1974. She now teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Choosing to abstain from commercial galleries until 1993, Rosler preferred to disseminate her work through underground newspapers, pamphlets, public performances and lectures. Due to a decline of not-for-profit and public art spaces, she is now represented by Chelsea Galleries.