Portrait of Rose Anderson
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Rose Anderson

About the Artist

          Born in Maryland in 1977, Rose Anderson spent her childhood sequestered in her mother’s carefully curated environment of religious indoctrination. When Anderson was 14 years old, her mother joined a cult to keep her children safe from the false doctrines of mainstream society.       In 1999, trapped in a loveless union within the cult, Anderson gave birth to her third child in as many years. As her husband’s efforts to control her escalated, she fled with her children and entered the workforce directly from a place of utter poverty and ignorance.      Finding herself too easily increasing her power and earnings in a world for which she had never had any preparation, Anderson again went in search of the truth. She attributed her unlikely success to one fact: the cult had trained her to identify with her whiteness in a way that could overcome seemingly impossible odds. She recognized her early life as performance art illustrating the reality of white privilege sustained by white supremacist messaging embedded in our culture from the earliest years of American history.       Anderson now lives in Baltimore County, her work informed by the ruins of Colonial-era industrial sites and the people once enslaved on this land.       Anderson’s work has been exhibited at Goucher College, George Washington University, George Mason University, and the D/E International Gallery at BWI Airport.  Her work was featured on Maryland Public Television (MPT) weekly program Artworks, and selected for smART stART, Cheryl McGinnis Projects, a Facebook Live Global Broadcast highlighting important artists.

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Artist's Statement

I investigate the material culture and social constructs that mask the pervasive and insidious nature of patriarchy, corporatocracy, white privilege, and institutional racism, juxtaposing the hubris of humanity with the immutable laws of nature. I use my photographs as a foundation for visual communication, recontextualizing and re-examining them in my photography, contemporary printmaking, and interactive digital scrolls.

Featured Work

Photos

A composition that recontextualizes a 1996 photo of my forced marriage in a religious cult as a way to explore patriarchal constructs and Eurocentric religious archetypes used as mechanisms for control.
On the portico of Hampton Mansion stands a statue, a custom portrait in marble of the infant child of one of the wealthiest slave-holding families in Maryland, the Ridgelys. The Latin inscription I have added translates: "I shall perish".
If you visit the immaculately restored Ridgely Mansion, you can sit on this charming antebellum iron bench and look out at the formal gardens. On a tour of the mansion, a guide will tell you how the children who lived here kept squirrels as pets. Close by but out of site, enslaved people endured hell on earth in the Ridgely's iron forges.
This work recontextualizes the statue of John O'Donnell of Baltimore, who owned around 70 enslaved people at the time of his death in 1805. As of this writing in December 2019 his statue still stands in the center of a public square that bears his name, on the Baltimore City street that bears his name, in the neighborhood of Canton, which is named for one of his plantations.