The Rose explores collage as feminist form and strategy through the work of 57 artists, dating from the 1960s through the present. It proposes a circular genealogy of collage and imagines an extended family of artworks, one in which kinship is formed through association. The Rose provocation it asks us to consider the mechanics of collage—ripping things apart and mending things back together—as a template for forging new social and political structures. It urges us to honor revision and reprisal as correctives for the skewed lenses that distort our worldview.

As a medium, collage is inherently contradictory: it is a restorative language pieced together from the very stuff that would do us harm. It counters violence with violence; it cuts, rips, and rends apart, necessitating the reparative act of gluing, binding, and reassembling things into a new unity. It is an art of centering the margins, of inversion, of turning things upside down in order to drain the phlegm of the status quo. Its energy, mysticism, and eroticism are transformative, helping us to imagine new ways of being, and, in that imagining, begin to get ourselves free.

The title pays tribute to Jay DeFeo’s magisterial painting The Rose. Over eight years, from 1958 to 1966, DeFeo (1929–1989) ladled paint onto canvas, one teaspoon at a time, until the massive work weighed almost a ton. The works in this exhibition touch DeFeo’s work at oblique angles: some reference its circularity, which offers the cyclical and revolutionary in place of the hierarchical, and some its accumulative aspect, gathering weight and meaning as elements and materials fuse.

Curated by Justine Kurland and Marina Chao. The Rose was originally organized by Justine Kurland, Sarah Miller Meigs,
and Libby Werbel for the lumber room in Portland, Oregon. It is accompanied by the publication The Rose: A Circular Genealogy of Collage (lumber room, 2025). the show runs from May 25 - August 31, 2025.