Suzanne Rosenblatt is a storyteller and likes to tell how she met her husband, Adolf. “In 1959, when I mentioned to a friend that I wished I had majored in art, she said, ‘I know someone who’s a great artist. You should live with him a few months, but he’s not the marrying type.’”
The friend introduced them that New Year’s Eve, and he offered her art lessons if she would be his model. Now, 45 years later, Adolph and Suzanne Rosenblatt are the parents and grandparents of a small dynasty of artists.
Recent works of seven Rosenblatt family members — including Suzanne and Adolph’s children, Eli, Joshua and Sarah Rosenblatt, daughter-in-law Pauline Rosenblatt and son-in-law, Craig Eli Stone — are on display through Aug. 8 at the Charles Allis Art Museum on Milwaukee’s east side.
“The Rosenblatts: A Family Exhibition” consists primarily of paintings, sculptures, drawings and poems. The exhibit showcases the family members’ breadths of style and perspective as well as the passion with which they engage in life and art.
The Rosenblatts came to Milwaukee from New York City in 1966 when Adolph took a teaching position in the art department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Their home was art-centered and freewheeling. The Rosenblatt children grew up surrounded by their parents’ art and were taught by their father.
Suzanne attributes her adventurous spirit to her unconventional mother, who was, among other things, a left-leaning journalist who flew airplanes from the same airport as Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. Suzanne says about herself that she “plays life by ear, travel[s] with no plans, open to whatever comes along.”
She often doesn’t limit herself to one form of artistic expression at a time. “I write in my drawings, sing in my poems, collaborate with other artists, intertwine with media whenever possible. I write travel journals, perform ecological performance poetry, draw, [and] paint…” she wrote in the exhibition brochure.
When she was almost 40, she began to write in response to a dream “about waiting for the #80 bus and it never came, so I took a different path. I woke up and wrote the dream down and later realized I was taking a different path (by writing),” she said.
She had long been making “word-drawings.” “While drawing a weeping willow at the duck lagoon, I noticed that weeping willow leaves look like tears. I wanted to include that observation in my drawing, so I used the words ‘weeping willow leaves look like tears’ to form the leaves of the willow. I soon was drawing ducks using the word ‘duck’, and geese using the word ‘goose,’ and gradually almost of all of my drawings became wordrawings.”
Suzanne wrote her first poem for a dancer who wanted a poem to dance to. After that, the Milwaukee poet Antler asked her to join the earth poetry group, and she has been engaged in writing poetry ever since.
On Gallery Night, Friday evening July 23, Suzanne, daughter Sarah, and Sarah’s husband, Craig Eli Stone, will perform some of their poetry at the Charles Allis Art Museum.
Sarah has paintings, vibrant with color, hanging alongside her poems. She says, in the exhibition brochure, that she has painted and made videos, but “I’m basically a poet.”
In her first book, “On the Waterbed They Sank to Their Own Levels,” published by Carnegie Mellon, her poems revolve around people and their relationships. She said that she is now working on poetry concerned with the passage of time.
At the exhibition opening on June 30, patriarch Adolph pointed out his wall-mounted sculpture entitled “The Many Faces of Sharon.” In it he has captured, in fired clay and acrylics, 11 of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s facial expressions. Adolph said that Sharon’s face interested him because, unlike most faces, it is constantly in flux and it reveals what he is thinking.
One of the works in the exhibit depicts a refrigerator door created by Adolph with colorful children’s paintings attached. Six of the seven grandchildren have drawings displayed on this refrigerator door.
So though this is billed as an exhibition of two generations of Rosenblatts, members of the third generation — ranging in age from age eight to four months — are beginning to also make their artistic mark.
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