Rosamond Casey has been an artist, calligrapher, designer and teacher for over thirty years. Her work has appeared in solo and/or group exhibitions in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art., The McGuffey Art Center, The Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, the Jacob Javits Center in NYC, the Second Street Gallery, The Sumner Art Museum, 1 Sculpture Place, Le Galerie Triangle and other venues. She has done numerous private and commercial commissions in her calligraphic and book arts practice under the name, Treehouse Book Arts. Her work has been acquired by the following public institutions for their permanent collections: the National Gallery of Art, The Library of Congress, Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, Bucknell University, The Melbert B. Cary Collection of Graphic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Special Collections Library, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
She is current past president and 24 year member of the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, a visual and performing arts center supported by the City of Charlottesville with 40 resident and 100 associate artist members.
Treehouse Book Arts includes a rotation of courses taught by Rosamond Casey at the McGuffey Art Center in calligraphy, creative bookmaking, papermaking, and "Mapping the Dark: A Course in Conceiving Art", as well as a two week summer camp for children in these subjects.
She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her two children and husband, John Casey, a novelist and professor at the University of Virginia.
Current/Recent Reviews
See Ms. Casey's profile by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA).
Rosamond Casey's M.D.M.A.D work is featured in the Winter 2006 edition of VQR - The Virginia Quarterly Review. You may order a copy from their website (see Winter 2006 Table of Contents). Read an essay on M.D.M.A.D. by Lawrence Weschler.
Ms. Casey was featured in the January 18, 2005 edition of C-Ville. See the article Making light of herself - Rosamond Casey journeys into the art of darkness
Rosamond Casey was also featured in the Volume 7, Number 1, 2004 edition of archipelago.
Book Dealers who carry Ms. Casey's work
Priscilla Juvelis, Inc. - Boston (617) 497-7570
Joshua Heller Rare Books, Inc. (202) 966-9411
Other Reviews
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Atlanta, Georgia "[Casey] is deeply concerned with writers, with words, and with wresting experience from an understanding of language. Although a number of smaller works are included in Illuminations three significant and ambitious books based on the writing of three authors - both real and imaginary - form the core of her exhibition: Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music, The Blue Cage and No Idea…Whatever." Of Wood Notes Wild: "A volume of almost transcendent visual poetry." "Casey's book No Idea…Whatever, is a work of enormous potential. As her most recent work and as an indication of future investigations, it possesses an inventiveness and a capacity for complex, original development that would be - and hopefully will be - a fascinating contribution to book art and to certain kinds of fiction. No Idea…Whatever might be called visual fiction. It comprises 12 single panels in which Casey has created the art work of a fictitious individual, Raymond Swann. This is exciting and potentially pregnant turf, and Casey shows herself to be on the edge of virtuoso originality. If she can create visual fiction that completely communicates an identity and style through visual forms, and that disembody herself and embody another, she will accomplish through visual means the equivalent of successful fiction. Casey has every reason to pursue this path and to fully develop the potential suggested by No Idea…Whatever." |
Arts Beat, front page, "Not too long ago, artist Rosamond Casey (made a tribute to her) grandmother: A richly hand-painted book she made herself. The book Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music sets the quotes from Simeon Pease Cheney's 1982 volume of musical notations of bird songs against lushly painted designs. Beyond the delicate beauty of the pages, the book had personal significance for Casey's grandmother who 'had become preoccupied with the decline of songbirds in her forest.' Casey's work is currently on view as part of the inviting show Book as Art X at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. For the past decade, curator of book arts and library research center director, Krystina Wasserman, has been putting together annual exhibits of books that are works of art. Wasserman calls Casey's work 'the star of the show.'" |
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Stephen Margulies, contributing writer, Curator, Bayly Art Museum Rosamond Casey's Exhibition, Regions of the Will, Ends This Weekend "Casey has created a display which tells the story of flow itself - for it is flowing movement that forms and unforms us. Ultimately, all form - including human form, including the form of our lives - is the story of flow. In the words of the artist herself, our story is the story of 'formative processes and flow dynamics that govern the emergence of organic elements.'" |
Review by Ruth Latter "I consider Rosamond Casey - local artist, calligrapher and founder of Treehouse Book Arts - as one of America's most talented and inspired creators of mixed media compositions that refer, in the broadest sense to lavishly illustrated and gorgeously bound books. Her works have been exhibited to high praise in Washington's art museums. In 1998 the Washington post said that Casey's compositions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts made her 'the star of the show.' She is surely the star of the current show at the McGuffey Art Center, through March 29. Five years in the making her solo exhibition in McGuffey's main exhibition gallery impressed me more than any other show I have ever seen at McGuffey." |
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART |
ABRIDGED ESSAY |
Interview with Neil Turtell, Executive Librarian for the National Gallery of Art "Unlike most artists' books, which look like books, hers was sort of a treasure chest. Obviously you can tell I think very highly of [Casey's] work and I don't do that lightly."
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by Johanna Drucker "Inner life and imagination are the substance of all of these works. The 'Dark' of the installation's title is that space of self's interior, its undisclosed locations in which the psyche processes as a means of survival. Meaning is not the object or outcome of such a sensibility. The over-arching spirit is motivated by record-keeping, scribing, a desperate message-in-the-bottle from a place of isolation and struggle. Every text in this work is a cry — some more strident, some plaintive, some more poignant and pathetic than the others. Writing and memory are always instigated under the shadow of loss. Acts of compensation are the core motivation of the characters whose testimonials these pieces presume to be — and the authorial voice of the artist, coordinating these exquisite fragments, flickers through the whole as a guiding spirit, but one whose own individual 'dark' remains unmapped, unrevealed." |
