2023 National Council Summer Celebration

Rose B. Simpson

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Art, an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2022, Simpson debuted her first large-scale public work, titled Counterculture, at Field Farm, MA (commissioned by The Trustees of the Reservation). She has enjoyed recent solo exhibitions at ICA Boston; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the Nevada Art Museum, Reno; SCAD Museum of Art, GA; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; and the Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; and The Bronx Museum of Arts, NY. Simpson’s work is held in numerous museum collections, including the Denver Art Museum; ICA Boston; Guggenheim, New York; MCA Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Pomona College Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum, OR; Princeton University Art Museum; and SFMOMA. Simpson lives and works on her ancestral homelands of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.    Artist Statement – April 7, 2023 My lifework is an investigation into what aesthetic tools I can create to heal the damages I have experienced as a human being of our postcolonial (post-apocalyptic) era—objectification, stereotyping, and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology. These tools are figurative and interactive sculptures that function in the psychological, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual and physical realms. They exist to witness; they erode our objectifications. They remind of the animate truth in all things—from our family of natural world beings to the consciousness in material. They reflect the movement of generations, the very verb of existence itself. The intention of these tools is to cure, therefore, my hope is that they become hard-working utilitarian concepts.

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