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A
alike, prods and pokes its way
into all of our lives. She likes
to cause problems, to upset
balances, to displace realities.
In Memory of
Rosalind Al-Aswad
(1942-2003)
The conventional is her foe.
Her presence almost makes
you nervous with the sheer
P
abundance of energy dancing on
her force-field. At any moment,
this abundance of life can rise
to an unheard-of pitch, and
O
suddenly, mysteriously, break
into a marvelous crescendo
of hysterical and contagious
E
laughter. Laughing in the
company of my mother is an
experience of ecstasy, complete
unconscious immersion
L
whirling in the absurdity of life:
crackling, squealing, shrieking
laughter. She feels her emotions Cu
from the center of her being; Th
total emotion, not inchoate
half-feeling. Complete pain,
complete joy, complete anger.
My mother cries in a movie
theatre like no Jewish mother
has ever cried in public before.
She lives at the maximum
threshold and her life is
overflowing. She lives, not apart
from the world, but within the
tumultuous movement and
ever-changing flow of it. She
lives without regrets, without
even the longing of unfulfilled Iw
exh
desires. Anything she wants The
to do in this life, she does. tale
ROSALIND
AL-ASWAD
PORTRAITS
OF AN
EXAMINED
LIFE
Curated by Lisa Wainwright, Dean of Graduate Studies
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
I wish to thank the Al-Aswad family and especially Dr. Basel Al-Aswad for conceiving of the idea for the
exhibition. Dr. Al-Aswad’s enthusiasm and generosity in support of this project has been immeasurable.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago thanks Dr. Al-Aswad for his assistance in showcasing our
talented and respected alumna Rosalind Al-Aswad.
Plate 1
Best Laid Plans of Mice
and Men
42 x 29 inches
watercolor d’arches
1989
About the
Female Gaze
2
3 Pla
Wo
42 x
wat
198
4 Pla
Our
42 x
wat
198
Plate 3
Women in Black
The paintings in the memorial exhibition fall into three groups:
42 x 29 inches genre scenes of couples from the time the artist lived in Oakbrook,
watercolor d’arches
1989 Illinois and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the
political watercolors made after her return from Baghdad with her
Iraqi-born husband in 1989; and the late self-portraits proliferating
as she became more and more cognizant of her impending death
from a degenerative neurological illness. Oakbrook, Illinois is a
place in which Rosalind probably never imagined she would end
up living. Born Rosalind Dawn Ziv on the south side of Chicago,
around 47th Street, to Russian-Jewish working-class parents,
Rosalind fulfilled the expectations of the 1950s by marrying at 18
and having her first child at 22. She came from a long line of hard-
working Chicagoans going back to the mid-nineteenth century,
including tailors, gangsters, and shop-keepers. Her father was
a truck dispatcher and her mother worked as a bookkeeper for
a Chicago newspaper. Rosalind’s mother was a dominant force,
strong and controlling. She wanted her daughter to achieve all that
she had not, given the constraints of being a woman of a certain
class in the early 20th century. But despite a feminist tone set early
in the home, like many children, Rosalind
defied her mother’s wishes that she attend
Plate 4
Our Children
Smith College, and married instead.
42 x 29 inches Rosalind was divorced by the age of 30, in
watercolor d’arches
1989 1972. But the new, undeterred Rosalind Barbrow
(her first husband’s name) moved on to become
a highly successful fashion consultant and
designer for Sears, Roebuck while raising her
daughter Susan. At that time Sears was located
on Homan Avenue, a tough neighborhood west
of Chicago’s Loop, with an even tougher work
environment. She was the only female executive
in a large office of seasoned businessmen.
fig. 1 Nicknamed “Rocky” due to her tenacity in
putting up with the all-male work scene, her colleagues’ jocularity
nevertheless extended to limits that, fortunately for them, predated
sexual harassment legislation. But Rosalind endured, and the
incipient feminist subject matter took further hold.
Al-Aswad came to art through design. And like another female
artist, the well-known Hannah Höch, she learned the practice
of art through the only viable profession available to creative
women: sewing and pattern making. Al-Aswad proved savvy and
exhaustive in her abilities, creating her own brand identity before
5
such things were de rigueur [fig. 1]. She lectured on fashion,
grooming, visual poise, and modeling. She wrote “trend letters”
and taught classes in retail and fashion merchandising. As a fashion
Plate 5
coordinator for men’s wear at Sears, she designed affordable but On the Altar of Revolution
trendy sports shirts appropriated from the latest designs in Paris, 29 x 42 inches
watercolor d’arches
but altered and produced by the hundreds of thousands for Sears. 1991
7 Pla
Spe
29 x
wat
199
Plate 6
Don’t Believe Everything
obsessed with Saddam Hussein and proceeded to make a suite of
You Read large-scale watercolors depicting the principal characters of the
29 x 42 inches
watercolor d’arches Middle East stage (see Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men, [1]).
1991
Figurative groupings including Hussein, Arafat, King Fahd of Saudi
Arabia, supplicants, and guards act out simple vignettes—all
under the horrified gaze of a mime in white face paint. Al-Aswad’s
doppelganger is the mime who, like Al-Aswad in Iraq herself, is
there as outside witness to the absurdity and tragedy of the scenes
before her.2
Rosalind writes in her travel journal: “…in the area [where]
my in-laws live, the internal police have taken up quarters. They
have taken over schools, private clubs, and homes. New people
do not want to move in. In better neighborhoods with fancier
homes, military personnel or prominent Baath party members
have taken up residency. At the curb in front of their homes are
trailers parked with two guards on duty, day and night.” Rosalind
saw how the situation directly impacted her husband’s family, and
so she translated their terror and grief into testimonials in paint.
Women in Black [3] depicts the sad mime in the foreground of the
composition ushering viewers into a space where two women sit
and mourn. All is set against an empty white ground that makes
Plate 7 the picture placeless, the subject timeless. And yet Rosalind’s
Speak Up
29 x 42 inches
source was quite specific: close family members had been
watercolor d’arches mysteriously accused of white-collar crimes and, with no trial,
1991
were put to death. Two years later, when the Al-Aswads visited,
the women were still in mourning for their husband and son.
On the Altar of Revolution [5], another Iraqi painting, is a large-
scale cartoon very much in the manner of 19th century realist
caricatures. It recalls Honoré Daumier’s “Gargantua,” for example,
of 1831, a scathing critique of the French leadership of Louis-
Philippe, in which Daumier depicts the rotund, seated king eating
the tax money while defecating more taxation decrees. Al-Aswad
likely knew this image from her art history classes at the School
of the Art Institute and she employs the same shifts in scale and
caricature rendering to depict the mighty Hussein, one arm holding
a model palace and the other a small red Mercedes around which
miniature soldiers hoist a rope to climb his grand facade. The first
President Bush looks on with contempt while Hussein rests his
foot on an oil can sputtering red droplets onto more of the robed
masses below. The painting is Al-Aswad at her most satiric and
surreal. She understood that oil was the lynchpin in the political
landscape of the time, but her representation only presaged how
9
Plate 8
destructive it would become. Our Children [4], another from the Sunday Afternoon #2
series, vividly shows the damage done. At the upper left of the 40 x 60 inches
oil on linen
composition, a collaged photo of the main street in the ancient city 1991
10
8
9
10
11
12
13 Pla
It S
54 x
oil o
199
14 Pla
Man
54 x
oil o
199
Plate 13
It Seems Like Yesterday
the backdrop of the current Iraqi war, Al-Aswad’s images loom
54 x 54 inches large. Propaganda, loss, and destruction are again quite relevant
oil on linen
1992 to the latest military conflict in Iraq.
Al-Aswad’s next major body of work was completed while living
in suburban Oakbrook. She was finishing her degree at the School
of the Art Institute, raising little children while in her forties, and
being the wife of a doctor whose family was emigrating from Iraq.
“I paint on Monday, shop and cook on Friday,” she wrote, while
going to school full-time on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Al-Aswad had never gone to college. So at the age of 43 she entered
into one of the most prestigious art schools in the country, and
again undaunted, proceeded to learn the content and technique
of visual art. The School’s well-known painting department was
fertile ground for Al-Aswad’s desire to learn. She worked with the
figurative artist Susanna Coffey and still-life painter Susan Kraut,
both instrumental in Al-Aswad’s development, as she would go on
to concentrate on works that combined both still life and portraiture.
Suburban life, however, was not ideal for Rosalind. She was
a city girl and waited for the time that she could return downtown.
She was not particularly maternal, she did not garden, she simply
wanted to paint. The Midwest Club, the gated community in
which she lived (and with which she could have titled one of her
Plate 14 paintings), with its man-made lakes and manicured lawns, was
Man’s Best Friend
54 x 54 inches far away from the urban culture in which she had grown up and in
oil on linen
1992
which her school and art community thrived. But again resolute,
she set about to paint what was at hand. From this corner of
Oakbrook emerged a series of ambitious large-scale paintings, all
of a similar format: two people in a room with props everywhere.
In complicated still-life studies, the artist set about painting the
everyday in highly symbolic terms.
Sunday Afternoon #1, #2 [8], and #3 [9] are three different
paintings of Al-Aswad’s models at the time: her housekeeper Lena
and Lena’s husband Harold. Each of the pictures shows the same
room with similar props and Harold in a wingback chair napping
or watching TV. Lena, more active, looks down with disgust at her
husband’s round, sedate body or gazes into a mirror fixing her hat
in order to get out into the world. In two of the pictures a window
looks onto a scene of fighting geese. Al-Aswad was fascinated with
these birds and depicts them over and over again in a number of
paintings. As geese are monogamous but ill-tempered, they were
perfect vehicles for the artist’s marital critique. She had begun
to question the complacent patterns marriage seemed to secure
15
and was also increasingly dissatisfied with suburban living and
her husband’s preoccupation with his Iraqi friends and relatives,
people to whom Rosalind felt profoundly culturally disconnected.
The paintings of Harold and Lena became reflections of the artist’s
troubled psyche.
Harold and Lena continued as key players in a number of Al- Plate 15
Left Behind
Aswad’s domestic dramas, some personal, others more political. 60 x 48 inches
oil on linen
She began to show images of the Iraqi war on the television that 1992
Harold sat before (Good Morning America [10]), or she would
include a gas mask resting on the back of a chair in which Lena sits
holding a fishing rod and staring at a tackle box and net (Interior
Nature [11]). In many of these pictures, Al-Aswad used exaggerated
shapes of shadows on the floors and walls, as well as mirrors
bouncing images around the space to heighten the emotional pitch.
At times, her motifs seemed to collapse onto the same plane with
the effect of one thing appearing to morph into another. In “Interior
Nature,” for example, Lena’s hair seems to rise up like that of a
Medusa’s head, but it is only the reflection of a grassy plant in the
mirror behind her. Or in Dangling Conversations [12], the base of
Lena’s phone at her ear turns into an Assyrian beard like those of
the soldiers in the earlier Iraqi work. The deliberate slippage of one
thing into another found in painting from Dali to Rosenquist was
not lost on Al-Aswad, who also worked to undermine that which
might appear normal.
Al-Aswad liked to complicate pictorial space with mirrors,
a common prop in vanitas still-lives. She pushed the iconography
further, however, hoping to destabilize everyday scenes with
endless spaces within spaces. It Seems Like Yesterday [13] shows
Basel’s parents in the midst of mirrors—on the wall, on the vanity,
hand-held—and in broken shards on the floor. Basel’s mother
is turned away from the viewer with only a glimpse of her face
reflected in the mirror she holds in her hand. Basel’s father stares
out expressionless and steady with hands and feet securely in
place. There are quirky elements all around: a Van Gogh-like chair
isolated in a far distant mirror, lingerie and stockings spilling out
of a dresser drawer, and the shattered mirrors, two piles each
adjacent to each of the figures. The curious props belie the vacant
expressions of the sitters, suggesting some underlying tension
close to the surface, if not directly expressed.
Al-Aswad never has her sitters engage with one another. In Meet
the Collins [16], a beautiful red and blue painting of a couple chosen
deliberately for their mixed-race status, each figure occupies its
16
15
16 Pla
Mee
60 x
oil o
199
own world. Roosevelt Collins lounges on the setee reading the
Wall Street Journal, while Barbara, his wife, arranges a vase of
white flowers. Between them is a Jeff Koons-like terrier, a prop
Al-Aswad employed in many pictures. Dog statues frequent the
work, but they are sculptures—unreal, artificial—set into scenes
Plate 16 where questions about conventionality and its disabuse drive the
Meet the Collins
60 x 48 inches content. Every happy family should have a dog, or at least the
oil on linen
1991
pretense of one. In the Collins portrait, Al-Aswad’s preoccupation
with the cultural differences of her own marriage and marriage in
general was again investigated. Al-Aswad seemed to construct the
piece so that the portrait could be cut down the middle, with each
side—male and female—kept whole and complete. Marriage worked
when the integrity of one was not dependent on the integrity of
the other. However, Al-Aswad does give a newspaper to Roosevelt
and a flowering plant to Barbara, as if to deconstruct the marital
harmony by pushing the old conceit that women are closer to
nature and men to culture, and thus all is in balance.
Al-Aswad’s props, critical to all the compositions, denote an
active family life but connote much more. The things and tasks with
which one fills one’s life, she suggests, ultimately do not mask our
existential plight. Objects are merely the surfeit vestiges of roles
we are asked to play while searching for true fulfillment. And Al-
Aswad examines her people and props with a clinical light, a light
that is clear and diffuse. The light enhances the play of material
and surface that the artist was so adept at conveying. It is evident
how she took great delight in carefully rendering the floral pattern
of a chair, for example, or the arabesque design in a rug. Putting
pattern against pattern, interlocking shapes and color schemes was
Al-Aswad’s forte, no doubt left over from her days in fashion design.
In 1990 Al-Aswad began seeking medical advice for a condition
the doctors speculated was Parkinson’s disease. She graduated
from the School of the Art Institute with a B.F.A. in 1991, and was
painting almost obsessively. She had several important exhibitions
and sales and was picked up by the Gwenda Jay Gallery. But the
illness had taken hold, and once again, the artist faced a new
challenge with the profound strength and unusual industry she
took to all tasks. As the illness progressed, she produced painting
after painting gazing into a mirror and contemplating a face whose
muscles began to slowly weaken. Not since the Iraqi paintings had
Al-Aswad included her own image and never so directly (see The
Swan [22]). Again she employed a variety of props to augment
the mood. Swans, religious figures, mirrors, angels, and balloons
19
Plate 17
kept a constant vigil around Rosalind’s seeking stare. The swan The Family
was from the memory of a time when her family found a swan and 15 x 48 inches
acrylic on linen
cared for it, only to have to let it go to its owner, who showed up 1996
18
19
20 Pla
Aut
20 x
acr
199
21 Pla
Lov
20 x
acr
199
Plate 20
Autumn
Al-Aswad painted all through her illness until she could no longer
20 x 16 inches hold the brush. But she continued to think and to dream and to live,
acrylic on canvas
1994 as her journal, now written by someone else, describes. And then,
once again, her life took a turn and she and Basel divorced in 2000.
Even now she was forced to question who she was, just as she had
so many times before. The Key [18] shows three Rosalinds, each
in a different costume, with her mirrors and angels behind. She
holds a key in two of the portraits, an overt symbol for the need
to unlock a secret or open a new door. As she approaches death
Al-Aswad addresses herself in search of answers to the questions
she has asked her whole life. And she is not the first. From Paula
Modersohn-Becker to Cindy Sherman, women artists have made
the self-portrait a feminist practice. Gazing at themselves, they
investigate how others gaze at them, at their roles—natural and
learned—and how these roles instill notions of womanhood.
Rosalind Al-Aswad was an expressionist of sorts. She faced her
demons whether in the workplace, on the domestic front, or in the
face of death. And all of this made its way into her painting for us
to behold with wonder. We should all have the strength of purpose
that Al-Aswad demonstrated in so many ways. Her children do.
Plate 21
Lovers And along with the painting, her legacy is alive in them. I never
20 x 16 inches
acrylic on canvas
knew Rosalind Al-Aswad, but I know she was an extraordinary
1994 woman. She once claimed, “I guess I have always seen life as a
series of parts you play,” and now these parts, and all that they
entail, will linger in my imagination for some time to come.
1
Rosalind kept sketchbooks and journals, writing steadily from the time she began art school until just before her death.
All quotes are drawn from this collection of journals unless otherwise indicated.
2
Christopher Al-Aswad pointed out the mime as his mother’s doppelganger.
3
I wish to thank my colleague, Martin Perdoux, who helped to read this image and many more.
23
On the Cover:
The Rosalind D. Al-Aswad Plate 22
Memorial Fund Swan
20 x 16 inches
acrylic on canvas
1994
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