ROSE MARASCO - Career Biography

Rose Marasco is a versatile and compelling artist and photographer and an inspiring and insightful teacher. Marasco’s photographs address the complexity of photographic meaning from a refined personal place of inquiry.

Marasco has produced several significant and innovative bodies of photographic work including Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange and Domestic Objects: Past and Presence, a ten year project of large format vibrant cibachrome prints, that infuse everyday objects with poetic symbolism. Marasco’s Ritual and Community: The Maine Grange received the Exhibition of the Year award from the New England Historical Association and was funded by a major grant from the Maine Humanities Council.

Marasco has had significant one-person exhibitions at Sarah Morthland Gallery in New York in 1998, 2000 and 2003; at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College; The Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, Maine; and at The Portland Museum of Art. Her work has also been featured in group shows of distinction at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, New York City's Marlborough Gallery, Photokina, the International Polaroid Exhibition, and at the Smith College Museum of Art.

Rose Marasco’s photographs are included in numerous private and public collections including most notably The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, The Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and the Photography Collection at The New York Public Library. The Library of Congress has selected photographs from her project Ritual and Community: the Maine Grange for acquisition; additional a set of these 150 exteriors and interiors were recently donated to the State of Maine. Marasco has received many grants and artists residencies in support of her work, including an invitation to the prestigious MacDowell Colony.

Marasco’s work has been highlighted in major publications with expanded listings in the New Yorker, New York, and, The Chronicle of Higher Education magazines. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Art New England, and numerous times in The Portland Phoenix, and Maine Sunday Telegram. Marasco’s work is included in Lucy R. Lippard’s The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, 1997, The New Press. New York and in Dear Print Fan, with an essay by Deborah Martin Kao, “Not Unordered: Rose Marasco’s Tender Buttons,” Harvard University Art Museums, 2001.
Marasco has a B.F.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where she studied with noted photographer and educator Nathan Lyons. Marasco has spoken and been a visiting artist at many institutions including Harvard University, Bates College, Colby College, Massachusetts College of Art, and Parsons School of Design. Marasco was awarded the 2005 Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from the Santa Fe Center for Photography. She has taught at the college level for 33 years and is currently Professor of Art at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine.

2007 © Rose Marasco Photography