​Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler’s work has long focused on the public sphere and landscapes of everyday life, especially as they affect women. Her videos from the early 1970s, including Semiotics of the Kitchen and Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, are among notable feminist works of the period. Her series of photomontages of the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, explores representations of women in mass circulation magazines. Her postcard novels, and other works, explore the experiences of women in different social positions relating to the production and consumption of food. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, culminating a series of iterations of her Garage Sale project, first held in San Diego in 1973. This work highlights the differential pricing systems applied to high-art and to household objects while exploring the liminal space in which women often operate, between the affective economy of the home and the cash economy of the world beyond. Her book The Art of Cooking: A Mock Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, an investigation of the rhetoric of cookbooks and cooking, is forthcoming. Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.