For thirty years, the late professor emeritus Art Rosenbaum instructed a generation of painters at the Lamar Dodd School of Art with an eye toward bold, layered compositions that highlighted the interiority of his subjects and the dynamic landscape of folk traditions and personhood in the South. Rosenbaum was a singular artist whose influence spanned the visual arts, music, and folklore studies.

Art Rosenbaum was born in 1938 in Ogdensburg, New York and earned his AB in Art History and his MFA in Painting at Columbia University. He was a distinguished faculty member in drawing and painting at the School of Art from 1976-2006. Rosenbaum also worked in France on a Fulbright Fellowship in Painting and had held a Fulbright Senior Professorship in Germany. His accomplished teaching earned him recognition as the university’s first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts.

“Art was such a unique talent who completely immersed himself in his varied yet overlapping interests. I often advise young artists that are worried about a career that the goal of this pursuit is to make a life, a living will follow. This is something that Art epitomized,”

said Joseph Peragine (UGA BFA ’83), director of the School of Art, who studied under Rosenbaum at the UGA in the early 1980s.

Art Rosenbaum with wife Margo Newmark Rosenbaum posing beside two students, including student Deborah Allison (BFA Painting '02) on the far right, in Cortona, Italy, Summer 2000. Photo courtesy of the Cortona Italy Alumni Organization.

Traces of his work adorn UGA’s Athens campus — from commissioned murals at the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts and the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library to a large-scale artwork on display at the Hugh Hodson School of Music.

Interview and documentation of Art Rosenbaum's mural “Door” at the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library at the University of Georgia, 2012. Video courtesy of Alan Flurry.

A dedicated musician and folklorist whose influence in the arts extends well beyond campus, Rosenbaum was awarded a Grammy for Best Documentary Recording in 2008 for the Smithsonian Folkways box set Art of Field Recording Vol. I: Fifty Years of American Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum.

Video feature on Art of Field Recording Volume II with commentary by Art Rosenbaum, 2008. Video courtesy of Dust-to-Digital.

At the University of Georgia, Rosenbaum’s artworks have been exhibited at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2006 in the solo exhibition “Weaving His Art on Golden Looms: Paintings and Drawings by Art Rosenbaum” and at the Dodd Galleries in the summer of 2021 in an exhibition of recent works curated by Tif Sigfrid, including Adamham Town and The Grey Rabbit Trilogy.

Paintings by Art Rosenbaum on view in the Dodd Galleries during the summer 2021 exhibition of his recent works curated by Tif Sigfrid.

In a Flagpole Magazine article on Rosenbaum’s summer 2021 solo exhibition in the Dodd Galleries, Athens arts journalist Jessica Smith described Rosenbaum’s paintings as

“vibrating with motion and colorful exuberance … reflect[ing] a tenderness and devout interest in the human condition.”

Smith continued,

“He works with time in a nonlinear fashion, suggesting that the past is often still very much present whether it takes the form of memory, song, storytelling or the legacy of other folk traditions.”

In the same article, Rosenbaum commented on his use of painting as a medium that freezes time and music.

“It’s really about a quest, and I wanted to make the city not look like an ancient city—and also have someone recording, someone singing and someone videoing—just to show that this is not a storybook view of the past. It’s the past and present. We’re in the time flow.”

On the morning of September 4, Art Rosenbaum passed away after a long illness at Piedmont Hospital beside his wife and fellow artist Margo Newmark Rosenbaum and their son Neil Rosenbaum.

Artworks by the late Art Rosenbaum are on view at the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art at Piedmont University in Demorest, Georgia through October 13. The exhibition aligns with a conference for the Georgia Art Education Association.