Join us at the Athenaeum in celebrating our fall exhibition Rose Salane: Fission or, Eclipse. The opening will follow a public Visiting Artist Lecture by Rose Salane at the Lamar Dodd School of Art room S151 on September 11 at 5:30 PM.

About the exhibition

Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage. 

The works in this exhibition offer an oblique view on tumultuous historical shifts: A series of diary entries describing an eclipse during the last year of the Civil War; a 1947 solicitation letter from Albert Einstein to academic institutions asking for the contribution of funding towards nuclear fission and atomic energy research; a set of decommissioned traffic light lenses suggesting a city grid in disarray. Together these object sets form dynamic intersections across time, war, observation, and power; their narrative contingencies underscoring the politics of the archive. 

Challenging viewers to find commonalities and disjunctions among the exhibition’s many parts, Salane also raises profound questions about the voices and objects charged with telling our histories: Whose thoughts, whether mundane or profound, have been preserved for future generations? What objects, though silent, speak on our behalf, and whose job is the work of their translation? Salane’s exhibition, a translation in its own right, is also a careful curation that uses the methods of the archive to put its limitations and potential on display.

About the artist

Rose Salane is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Solo presentations of Salane’s work have been held at Tank Shanghai, CN (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, UK (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2019). In 2021, her work was featured in the New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, NY, and in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2022, she was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Salane completed her MA in Urban Planning at Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY, and her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.