Selected Reviews: 1995—2023

  • Portland Phoenix, Hidden in this picture, by Edgar Allen Beem, July 19, 2023, Vol. 4 No. 34, View Online

  • Portland Press Herald, Art review: Portland photo museum puts on another jam-packed show by Jorge S. Arango, January 15, 2023, View Online

  • LIGHTS OUT — Featured Artist a video interview, 2022
    Click here to watch on YouTube.

  • Art New England, UNE Photography Collection by Carl Little, Sept./Oct. 2021

  • Portland Press Herald, With Funding in Hand, UNE Photography Collection Expands, by Bob Keyes, September 27, 2021

  • Hyperallergic, Photographs That Write With Light, by John Yau, November 16, 2019, View Online

  • Art Spiel, Plastic Expressions in Particularity: Nature Moves in Tracy McKenna’s Shift at Able Baker, by Julien Langevin, November 21, 2019

  • OSMOS, UticaGlass, byTomMcDonough, feature article & portfolio of my earliest photographs. Issue 17,Winter 2019

  • Hyperallergic, A Photographer Who Deserves to Be Widely Known, by John Yau, August 30, 2015, View Online

  • New York Times, Spring Museum Exhibitions, from Masks to Renoirs by Judith H. Dobrzynski, March 16, 2015

  • Boston Globe, In Portland, a Survey of Rose Marasco’s Photographs by Mark Feeney, 5/29/015

  • Maine Sunday Telegram, In a Summer of Art, a Rose Blooms, by Bob Keyes, May 24, 2015

  • Maine Sunday Telegram, Both Smoke AND Mirrors: Photography of Rose Marasco, by Daniel Kany, May 31, 2015

  • Portland Phoenix, From Invention to the Ordinary: Five Decades of Photography by Rose Marasco, by Britta Konau, April 30, 2015

  • Down East Magazine, Through a Rose-Colored Lens, by Brian Kevin, May, 2015

  • The Sound, In the Present, by Chloe Kanner, May 6 - 12, 2015

  • artscope, New Perspectives on Familiar Themes, by Jamie Thompson, May/June, 2015

  • The Arts Fuse, Photographer Rose Marasco–The Search for Juxtapositions, by Kathleen C. Stone, June 16, 2015

  • American Photography, The 10 Best New Photo Exhibits of Fall 2015, by Lindsay Comstock, Sept.14, 2015

  • Maine Home + Design, Featured artist, by Britta Koneau, April, 2014

  • Art New England, Maine Women Pioneers III, by Christopher Volpe, January-February, 2013

  • Art Photographers Index-photoeye; Invitational online global art index, 2012

  • The Portland Phoenix, What is Real?, by Britta Konau, March 16 2012

  • Maine Sunday Telegram, photographic memorables by Bob Keyes, March 11, 2012

  • Photo District News, New York, NY, The Portfolio Review Diaries: The Reviewer’s Reflections, by Debra Klomp Ching, highlighted photographer, July, 2008

  • Quest France, An American Photographer at The University- Brest, May 3, 2008

  • Art New England, featured artist/interview by Lauren Fensterstock, Dec./Jan., 2005-06

  • Photo District News, Market Report: Cataloguing Portland, by Edgar Allen Beem, June, 2005

  • Maine Sunday Telegram, Marasco’s Photos Speak to Intimacy, by Philip Isaacson, February 22, 2004

  • The Portland Phoenix, A Colored Place, cover story, exhibition review, and symposium preview by Chris Thompson, February 6, 2004

  • Maine Sunday Telegram, Photographer Evokes Complexity from Everyday, cover story and interview by Bob Keyes, February 1, 2004

  • Valley Advocate, Domestic Detritus, by James Heflin, November 6, 2003

  • New York Magazine, March 2, 1998, text and photograph, Sarah Morthland exhibit

  • The New Yorker, Goings On About Town, New England Diary Feb. 23, 1998, extended text

  • The New York Times, New England Diary, by Margarett Loke, February 20, 1998

  • The Village Voice, Voice Choices by Vince Aletti, February 4 -10, 1998

  • The Chronicle of Higher Education, Endpaper, May 26,1995, text and image

  • The Boston Sunday Globe, Three shows reveal an intimate, feminine side of life, Christine Temin, May 14,1995 

Excerpts from reviews, articles, & catalogues

Sarah Hotchkiss, SPACE
“In a love letter to a very different landscape, Rose Marasco’s stop-motion video [Mohawk River] of a train ride from New York City to Utica traces another line across a map—a well-worn and personally significant journey. We all have these routes, short or long. Traveled during formative times, they cut deep grooves in our memories. Following the Mohawk River between Albany and Utica, this 37-second video captures, even in its short runtime, the gray of a December day, riverbanks dotted with snow, the trees dark and bare. Somehow, in fleeting images, Marasco captures the impatient feeling of nearing home, a feeling that exists even when you’re far removed in physical space and years.”

John Yau, Hyperallergic
"The results can be eccentric, tender and touching… Marasco is interested in bringing largely invisible histories into the light. Sympathy seems to be one of her primary motivations, but that is not all that possesses her. She is curious, restless, and open to trying out new and challenging possibilities. The angles and points of view Marasco chooses in her photographs breathe new life into her subjects. At times, I felt like a flaneur, or a scribe preserving a story, or detective collecting evidence. Formally speaking, her exploration of varying viewpoints and angles has moved her decisively away from the frontal images we associate with so much modernist photography."

Jessica May, Chief Curator, Portland Museum of Art, Maine
"Throughout her career, Marasco has remained uninterested in genres such as documentary, landscape, and portraiture. Instead she has consistently mined concepts of framing, point of view, and orientation to makes images with a complex relationship to the everyday image of the world."

Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe
"…the way both images demonstrate Marasco’s talent for elegant, off-center framing. That framing can feel as classically straight-on as a Walker Evans photograph and as inexplicable as something shot by a Paris Surrealist. …there’s a cool grace to the surface of so many of these images. They speak, to use Marasco’s vocal metaphor, in a precisely enacted murmur."

Britta Konau, The Portland Phoenix
"Going back and forth between the exterior world and the interior, in the sense of the domestic and the psyche, Marasco’s work becomes a negotiation of being a woman and a photographer. The continuous oscillation between photography as realism and as invention sometimes explores the properties of photography itself, including visible farming, unfamiliar viewpoints, and the possibility to create new realities, as in the fascinating photomontages of the early 1980’s."

Sarah Morthand, director, Sarah Morthand Gallery, NYC
"Soon after I founded my gallery in December of 1996, Rose and I met to review her work. I was deeply impressed by the caliber of her portfolio and her quiet intelligence… Rose’s work fully reveals her talents as a photographer and her appreciation of history, writing, and objects. Rarely have I seen the combination of techniques (color, black and white, montage, image construction) used so successfully and appropriately."

Lucy-Flint Gohlke, former curator Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College
"By offering domestic objects up to public display in a profoundly felt way, Marasco convinces us that the stuff of everyday life, and our response to it, defines us as truly and significantly as heroic narratives that so often monopolize our understanding of culture… The work is brilliant both visually and conceptually..."

Vince Aletti, The Village Voice
"With these photos of brightly colored aprons, wooden clothespins, quilt squares, and button arrangements, Marasco evokes and celebrates women’s work without resorting to clumsy didacticism. Placing three old thimbles in a bird’s nest, a girl’s penmanship book among autumn leaves, or a wooden rolling pin on a rock by a lake, Marasco has a light, sure, and very charming touch"

Margarett Loke, The New York Times
"…highlighting commonplace items in rural New England women’s lives, Ms. Marasco succeeds not only in investing them with the kind of aura surrounding Shaker household objects but, also in giving them a Surrealistic cast. Buttons sewn in the form of a cross on a piece of cardboard look decorously iconic. But, in the companion picture of the back of the cardboard, the thread and small safety pins holding the button in place seem to connote quiet suffering."

 

Alison Ferris, former curator Bowdoin College Museum of Art
"Marasco brings maps and detachable collars together in Collars and Atlas, which is not as unlikely a combination as it might at first seem. Like the lines that mark the borders of countries on maps, collars mark the boundaries of the body. Marasco playfully makes formal juxtapositions with the collars and the maps, “feminizing” the markings of territories..."

Goings On About Town, The New Yorker
"The most affecting works recontextualize old photographs; one picture, of a woman named Florence Burrill Jacobs (whose diary the artist also found), is elegantly surrounded by a carpet of umber grape leaves, rhyming with the image of the young woman sitting in the doorway overgrown with grapevines."

Deborah Martin Kao, curator of photography, The Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University
"…depending on the viewer’s frame of reference, her photographs might alternately be interpreted as representing a documentation of domestic handiwork, an array of scientifically organized specimens, a display of consumer goods, or abstract art. Marasco intentionally prompts multiple interpretations of how meaning is modulated by culturally prescribed and frequently gender-based methods of classification…

Marasco’s work holds in it an exquisite tension the subject matter, its representation, and its signification."

Christine Temin, The Boston Globe
"She startles you with surreal juxtapositions, like the rolling pin balanced on a rock by the shore of a lake. In taking an indoor object outside she forces you to contemplate its possibilities. The rolling pin can smooth and strike, be used to make a pie or for violence. In another work, a washboard that has somehow escaped the laundry and moved into a woodland setting rests against a tree: The half-elegiac, half-comical image suggests flight from the confines of home into the freedom of nature. Marasco’s brilliantly colored photographs come off as secrets revealed."

Julia Van Haaften, former curator The New York Public Library Photography Collection
"I have known and admired Rose’s work for many years. Beginning with the Maine Grange documentation which expands intellectually upon a taxonomic formula for architectural photography established by Berenice Abbott, Rose has evolved and matured into an important photographic artist, working with universally accessible subject matter in concepts and compositions uniquely her own. Rose’s later work brings a whole new meaning to documentary—powerfully affecting yet never sentimental as it addresses the concerns, the environments, and ordinary daily lives of women in the last century. Original, insightful, and enduring, Rose’s constructed photographs use found artifacts… to evoke individual women and their lives. Most importantly, the photographs’ compelling visual beauty and formal rigor transcend pragmatic social references"

Edgar Allen Beem, Maine Times and contributor Photo District News
"Wishbone Diary, for example, features an open diary around which are arranged what look to me to be broad magnolia leaves and cones and a wishbone. The handwritten January 14 diary entry reads, in part, ‘ Work. Read book in evening & went to bed. O Gee, I wish something would happen.’
There is something both precious and political about the way Marasco chooses to honor the anonymous women whose private lives she has entered through their writings."

Aprile Gallant, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs Smith College Museum of Art
"One of the exceptional things about Rose as an artist is her ability to create powerful bodies of work in both black and white and color, and to work on many different strong projects at one time. On my last studio visit with her, she showed me three different bodies of work in different formats, all of which were well crafted and conceptually compelling."