Gregory J. Rose is a prolific creative: a painter and educator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

2024 Exhibition | The Gates of Awakening: Provide and Nurture

2023 Exhibition | VĪRYA – OF THE MESSENGER

My Collaboration Process

Studio visits, exhibition proposals, professional consulting, curation, prospective partnership/collaborations.

Step 1

Send me an email describing your interest in collaborating by following the link below. Please include the nature of your project and general details of your proposal.

Get Started

Step 2

While you’re waiting for a personal response from me, you’ll receive an automated email with my credentials (resume and CV) and important information.

Step 3

I will reach out to you via email within 3-5 business days to connect. Here, we’ll have the chance to discuss a potential partnership.

Step 4

If we are both interested in moving forward together, I’ll send you my contract and we can negotiate the terms of our partnership.

Step 5

The project begins! Working closely together, we bring our vision to life.

My Portfolio

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MUSIC AND VIDEO

Projects
Intellectual Persiflage
“Loud” series
Who Killed U. B. F
What Shoes do you Where

Years
2004-2018

Fragmentation

Using collage, fragmentation, quilting, and weaving, I take the meandering path of abstraction to push the history of drawing and painting, filtering stimuli from life experiences- travel, collaboration, community activism/ engagement, and art education. My layered, complex, and diverse realities are interpreted through my visual language, communicating in the vein of those ancestors wailing through the waves in our oceans and seas.

Fragmentation is the way I speak to how at times we all are fragmented in some way. The question lies in how one puts those pieces back together to create a new way of looking and or navigating.

Intellectual Persiflage

“Loud” series

Who Killed U. B. F

What Shoes do you Where

Two Dimensional Portals

Projects
Street Glyphs Series
Neo-Khemetian Express Street Hieroglyphs Series
For Her, For me. For them.
Take the Bull by the Horns
Dens and Dumpsters
Pigs feet and ox tails

Years
2018-2023

The work presented combines visual language co-opted from the broad landscape, mainly derived from urban elements such as graffiti, architecture, skylines, and community, as well as from nature, spirituality, philosophy, and the history of abstraction in drawing and painting. Intersecting with the history of skateboarding, the vast space found above us in the sky, and various musical worlds and influences.

Street Glyphs Series. Photo credit: Steve Stenzel

Neo-Khemetian Express Street Hieroglyphs Series. Photo credit: Steve Stenzel

For Her, For me. For them.

Take the Bull by the Horns

Dens and Dumpsters

Pigs feet and ox tails

Three Dimensional Portals

Projects
Mal de ojo y Comida

Years
2023

Mal de ojo y Comida An homage to all my family both blood and chosen. Still delving into the idea of “Home” and “Family”. Mal de ojo y Comida seeks to come to terms with the reality that my family is international, complex, intersectional. My circle transcends tradition, economics, cultures, and geography, Looking to both Latin/ Mexican traditions and the stories and experiences of my Black- experience in the world.

Mal de ojo y Comida Is an acknowledgement, an acceptance and embracing of all my family(s). With the use of Copal, Mortar and Pestles, Copal burners/ vessels; I wanted to bring the idea(s) and traditions of both Black and Brown Cultures and traditions- stories. Let the Copal and smells take you to that other worldly and spiritual space and let me fill your mind and soul with the thought of feeding you as you enter the door and feel at Home. Let the eggs transport the Ojo- the envy, good and bad, the jealousy, the negativity from your sacred spaces. Let your soul, person, family and friends stay safe, warm and healthy with the love we all seek and hope to share.

Mal de ojo y Comida-vessel and burner contemporary artifacts

Mal de ojo y Comida-mortar and pestle contemporary artifacts

Mal de ojo y Comida-mortar and pestle, epsom salt, copal, artificial chickens and eggs artifacts

Mal de ojo y Comida-copal burners

Digital Portals

Projects
Code Switch Experiment

Years
2024

My Digital portals are a combination of sound, space, and visual art. By creating an innovative approach to art by combining traditional 2-D art with digital animation. The use of digital tablets, Smartphones and AI are all a part of the process that allows risk, happenstance, loss of control at times while focusing and creating and experience for the viewer(s).

Code Switch Experiment-gallery experience

Excerpt from:
BEAUTIFUL DISRUPTIONS: PORTALS AND HEALING IN THE WORK
BY GREGORY J ROSE
Dr. Megan Arney Johnston, Curator

”Code Switch Experiment”, an immersive video projection created specifically for the Concordia Gallery. It’s a brave gesture to offer up such an emotional overture to the audience upon first engagement with the exhibition. This was an intentional curatorial gesture that hoped to draw the viewer into the world of the artist while also experiencing embodied movement of active participation. Visitors will be immersed in the small gallery space, taking in the animated images of Rose’s art and glitchy, active movement in the projection. If desired, they could take another step and scan the QR codes provided and hear a mixed soundtrack looped on Tik Toks, created by the artist with collaborators. These views can sync and be reinvented by the individual to experience in real time in the space or at home, effectively transcending the gallery space as well as your time and experience within it. Code Switch Experiment is in direct defiance of commercialized creative experiences commonly found today. Instead, the intimacy of the spatiality–that is our understanding and experience of space– facilitates a more embodied experience. The installation becomes what the artist calls a digital portal through time, place, and space. “This project aims to explore how geographies influence politics and culture, ultimately determining the way we see, touch, feel, and interact when the familiar and unfamiliar occupy the same space.”

Tik Toks from the QR Codes from Code Switch Experiment

Projects
U know its me
Busted
Out of the Darkness
SooVAC Virtual Connnections

Years
2011-2022

Music & Video

A collection of both Artist Talk appearances and Music Videos

G-hop is a persona developed under the producing and guidance of Christopher Heidman of the group Sukpatch. In 2011 we released Pennsyltucky, my first album. Along with appearing in a video—Busted—G-Hop, filmed in my basement with Heidman in one day MB on the U Know It’s me ft. Skaggz (an alter ego of G- Hop)—a collaboration of the Midwest and East coast sounds.

Riverland College: “Out of the Darkness” solo exhibition

SooVAC Virtual Connnections: Christopher E Harrison and Gregory J Rose in Conversation: Christopher E. Harrison and Gregory J. Rose shared stories about their trip to Dakar, Senegal during their collaborative studio session at Galerie Sobo Bade during GAP (Global Arts Project) VII

Curation

Change is God
Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest

Credit: Sophia Abrams and Soo Visual Arts Center, NEA Artworks

Curatorial process

I wanted to welcome Black Abstractionists of the Midwest—home. Home in the sense of the exorbitant feeling of peace, smells of home, unexplained nostalgia—when I entered Africa Via Senegal. My first-time home to the place it all began for us. But I am American, I am Black, I am an artist that thrives in the abstract—and I live, work and care for my family in the Midwest. After a few days in Senegal, I was adopted by Ahmed/Mohamed, of the Baye Fall Sufi Muslim Sect of Senegal; I was given the name: Fallou, after Mame Fallou Gallas. The Baye Fall fed me, we ate from the same bowl, shared coffee, stories, and knowledge. I was home and plan to go back some day.

The night we spent below the stars on the beach—celebrating the new year 2018 turned to 2019. The broken stories, the fragments of histories and familiar faces started to make more sense coming from my journey so far on this earth. The Bye Fall wear their hair in dreadlocks like myself and have a very idiosyncratic story and dress. Patchworked like the diaspora of so many Africans and African descendants. Colorful and delicate intersectional patterns, cultures, textures, maps come to pass. No, I am not Muslim, nor do I claim to be Baye Fall, but I did learn to care, love, and accept my family during that trip to Senegal, to Africa—home.

Coming back to the Midwest and fast forwarding to this exhibition and this group of artists—like the stars above on that New Year’s Eve—we aligned and are beginning to celebrate by growing through change. The intersectionality, universality—of our fragmented stories and journeys are beginning to be mapped out for our families to be guided back home. In all the ways home is defined for we Black folk—we are Black abstractionists in the Midwest. Portals to new ways of scientifically analyzing our existence on our terms from the earth through to the multitude of galaxies for we all to discover and expeditions to engage with. Transformations of the soul and resurrection of geographic histories sorted out in a multitude of media.

This is the moment we all have gathered in the kitchen and at the table. We are “speaking on It”—the “truth”—sharing our realities. Finding my family, my counterparts—my “People”—was the main objective. I wanted to feel home here in the Midwest, with all its nuances, complexities, and challenges. There is a shift, a change—a transformation of blackness, family, home, community. This shift lives within the world of abstraction. Never linear, never predictable, but rather other worldly. I finally found a way for us to come home. I took the time to “be a good listener”—as my Nanny Helen would say. I wanted to, in the words of the beloved Northside of Minneapolis Kirk Washington Jr.—Bro Sun; “Send the elevator back down”. So my “ People” can make it up too! I wanted the world to know who we are and what stories we have to share. I wanted those who also feel like most of us—Black folk—a lot of us Black Abstractionists. A little lost—until you smell home, feel home, see home. These artists and the work I have chosen I feel comes full circle for me. Like the time Christopher Harrison and I jumped into the ocean off the coast of Senegal while participating in a residency for GAP( Global Art Project). Looking into their eyes—and engaging with this work has felt like the freedom and possibilities—that come out of swimming for the first time in Africa with your brother—peace Badda. Peace and love to all our family in Change is God-Take Root Among the Stars: Black Abstraction in the Midwest