Nancy Rosen, Founder and Principal
Public Service
Nancy Rosen’s public service has been complemented by her ongoing dialogue with artists, architects, landscape architects and planners. She has served as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s representative on New York City’s Public Design Commission, and as mayoral appointee to the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Arts and Design. Continuing this focus on art and design in the public realm, she was one of the 13 jurors charged with selecting a design for the 911 Memorial at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.
Rosen has also chaired and participated in numerous artist selection panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the General Services Administration, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She has been an advisor and panelist for the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs as well as several smaller communities throughout the country.
Awards and Honors
Awards and honors include a Certificate of Merit from the Municipal Art Society of New York; Annual Honoree and Keynote Speaker for the Fairmount Park Art Association, Philadelphia; Two Awards for Excellence in Public Art & Design from the Art Commission of the City of New York; and the Art & Work Award from the Wapping Arts Trust, for the most outstanding art collection for a corporate building in the United Kingdom.
Education and Early Career
Nancy Rosen has an academic background in Art History and Museum Studies (Goucher College, B.A., Brown University, M.A.) including study and research abroad, first in Florence as an undergraduate and then more extensively in Rome as a graduate student.
Early in her career she co-organized three influential exhibitions that explored and expanded on the accepted boundaries of art and context: Documenta VI, the international exhibition in Kassel, Germany; Projects in Nature, which featured works of 11 artists created over the course of a year on a rural site in New Jersey; and Monumenta, siting and commissioning fifty-four major sculptures along the coastline and on the grounds of historic landmarks in Newport, Rhode Island. These early projects afforded Rosen the opportunity to focus on major examples of 20th century sculpture and also to shepherd younger and more experimental artists as they created new, site-focused works.
She has published and lectured on topics relating to art in the public realm and participated in numerous panel discussions exploring this territory. Prior to establishing her own office in 1980, Rosen also collaborated on several films with her husband, the documentary filmmaker Michael Blackwood: Masters of Modern Sculpture; 14 Americans, Directions of the 1970s; Artpark People; and Christo’s Running Fence.