Laura Rosen

Biography

Laura Rosen’s subject has always been the landscape, architecture, people, and energy of New York City. Currently, she most often works on-site, using watercolor, ink, marker pen, or graphite. She also works with watercolor at a larger scale in the studio. This portfolio contains selections of her recent on-site and studio work.

She first explored the city as a photographer, often from high windows and rooftops that looked over a whole world of turrets, gargoyles, and gardens. This became the subject of her first book, Top of the City: New York’s Hidden Rooftop World. Her second book, Manhattan Shores: An Expedition Around the Island’s Edge, was a photographic exploration of Manhattan’s entire waterfront as it was becoming accessible to the public for the first time in memory. 

Her painting “Above the Shadows” was included in the exhibit “Rise 2018! Members and Guest Artists at Noho M55” in 2018. In 2001, eight of her photographs were included in the New York Historical Society show “Up on the Roof.” At the Urban Center in New York,  the show “Fifty Years of Fort Tryon Park,” featured her photographs along with plans for the park’s restoration by Quennell Rothschild in 1985. Her one-woman photographic exhibit “Top of the City: New York City’s Hidden Rooftop World,” also at the Urban Center, coincided with the publication of her book of the same name in 1982. 

Laura Rosen was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design during the 1986-1987 academic year. She received a B.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art (now The University of the Arts) and an A.A.S. from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Collections: New-York Historical Society Museum of the City of New York

Books: Manhattan Shores: An Expedition Around the Island’s Edge. Published by Thames and Hudson, 1998 Top of the City: New York’s Hidden Rooftop World. Published by Thames and Hudson, 1982, 1983, and 1990.

Artist statement

New York City is my subject. I currently work with watercolor, ink, or graphite, often at a scale small enough to hold in my hands or on my lap. This allows me to work rapidly and move to new vantage points with relative ease as city life flows around me. Sometimes, interactions with curious onlookers add energy to the images. By the time I finish, the people and other elements of the scene will be completely different than when I started. Other times, I’ll use an inconspicuously small sketchbook to capture a New Yorker daydreaming in a park, or an awestruck family looking up at a dinosaur at the Museum of Natural History. Some of this onsite work, whether done on paper, in a sketchbook, or in one of my photos, becomes the basis of larger works done in the studio.