 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or Turk or Japanese, but anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American. Welcome back to A Nation of Immigrants, a bi-weekly interview program featuring the lives of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, cultural diversity and their contribution to American experiment. Today's guest is Professor Tom Rose, creative artist and professor of art. Welcome Professor. Professor Rose, can you hear us? Thank you, yes. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much and I appreciate your invitation. It's our honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. I'm going to read your short bio to our audience and then I have some questions for your professor. So you received your BFA from the University of Illinois-Champaign and by pure serendipity, that's where I get my Master of Arts in Art History. So we have some in the deep connection. Fellow Alinais. Fellow Alinais. Exactly. Fighting Alina. And you received your IMA from UC Berkeley and you also studied at Long University in Sweden. And you are a very accomplished artist and you have been a professor of art at the University Minnesota Department of Art for many, many years. And you are well known for your innovative contribution to contemporary art. With a passion for creativity and unique artistic vision, Professor Rose Art explores themes of identity, memory and human condition. Some of Professor Rose's artwork are thought-provoking, spanning from painting, sculpture, and intelligent art, captivate audience with the conceptual depth and aesthetic appeal. Along with your artistic practice, Professor Rose is an art educator and made a significant impact to the younger generation of aspiring artists. And you have, your achievements have garnered recognition and you have exhibited your artwork across the world. Some of your artwork has been permanently collected by galleries and museums in New York, Minnesota and China. And as we are part, again, we are very honored to have you on the show. And let's go straight to questions. And because in our correspondence, you mentioned that your third generation Irish-English American. And do you know how your ancestors came to Seattle in the United States? Yes, yes, that's correct. And I could start, I could read you a little bit of a text here. My grandfather wrote a memoirs back in about 1932, 33. He died in 1936. And he starts this with, I do not quite know why I'm writing this, certainly not from Vane Glory. I have little cause for that. Perhaps it is because my boys, my father and my uncle, have indicated that they might read it. Perhaps because I want them to know what their father did before them. Whatever the reason, I shall try to sit down as truthfully as I may be in these lines that follow what little I know of my forebears and the story of my life. And there's one other little section I would like to read from this. My father's name was James Moore Rose, and my mother's Agnes Leslie. Both my father and my mother were descendants of ancestry, which so far as I can learn seldom rose above or descended below the level of respectability. Some of them were titled, some were farmers or tradespeople, and probably some of them not much of anything. A few were hanged, one was beheaded, but for no more reason or crime than I have been told, than they belong to the wrong political party failing to keep still about it. My grandfather was a second generation immigrant from Ireland. His parents came from both Scotland and Ireland and England. The mixture between Scottish word for rose could translate or often used as rose or a rose, or a ross, etc. But the main one is essentially rose. He goes on to describe how or when they came to the United States in about 1840. It would take a number of years, but anyway, certainly the Irish potato famine in 1847 was a critical point in which many came to the United States. My great grandfather came as a single person in about, about then, about 1840, mid 1840s, landed in New York, and he actually then landed in Brooklyn, and after being there for a while established a stone carving operation. He had been trained as a stone cutter in Ireland as a indentured, well, essentially as a trainee. And at that time, the idea was that you gave your son or whatever to the, to the, to the master. And he was apparently at that time, apprentices were not very well treated, much as though they were slaves. And a little bit of money went to the father and not anything much to the son other than room and board, which was me here at the time. Anyway, he took off and jumped the ship and came to the United States landing in New York. I mentioned, once he was here, he took his trade to the streets. And at the time, New York was in the process of building a wide variety of constructions of row houses and many of them requiring things like mantle pieces, etc, etc, all hand carved stone. So he established a business, a trade, and had a stone cutting firm that was located at 33rd and Fifth Avenue in New York, about where Macy's is now. And that lasted up until the just prior to the Civil War. He had a partner, my grandfather or great grandfather, excuse me, went off to, to, at that time, Ohio to start essentially to expand the business. And that was when the war broke out, the Civil War broke out. And so when he returned after sort of was able to do it, his partner had run off with everything. And so there was little left of the stone carving business. And so then he moved to Chicago. Anyway, that's essentially the background. And his training as a, as a stone cutter, stone mason was then translated to my grandfather at the age of about 18 or something right in about there in Chicago, who went to work as an intern or essay apprentice to an architect named JJ Egan, who did a lot of work in and around the Chicago area. They didn't do any of the large skyscrapers that were going up. But my grandfather then worked with them on a number of, of in particular churches and so on doing a lot of stone carving. He was extremely good at it and was well appreciated. He did manage to do a lot of the work for the Irish industries building for the Chicago exhibition are essentially for the white city that occurred in 1884. And so right about that time, he established his own business moving to Milwaukee and worked with a partner named Charles Kirkoff. He had a couple of partners before that or a couple of people that he worked with before that. But Kirkoff had had an established name in the city. And so they had a good roster of clients. And then around the turn of the century, 1900, my partner, my grandfather and his partner were very active in the area. They did a lot of work for the Keith Orpheum to design vaudeville theaters around the country. Two of them here, one of them here in Minneapolis, the Orpheum Theater in New York, there was the Palace Theater sort of Broadway. And in Chicago, there were several in Milwaukee, Riverside and so on. But he also did a number of projects for the Schlitz Brewery as well as for the E-Line family, the owners then of Schlitz Brewery. And so those things are still available, still visible. One of the projects I did sort of creatively after reading this long memoir, I decided at one point that I really wanted to do something about it or with it, use it as some kind of a jumping off point. And I had been doing a series of books and or shall I say, these books are very small editions working with this particular one with my grandfather. I was very much interested in using the old drawings that they used to do, of course, on vellum actually and also on canvas or that was done with an architectural drafting linen, very fine linen, and all of course by hand. And so I went around to archives and so on. And I found that there were a number of drawings. Actually, my father had started an archive in Milwaukee at the actually started the architectural archive in Milwaukee. And I mean, to interrupt the professor, you mentioned that you this is naturally go to my second question. Yeah. And your grandfather and was a craftsman. Yeah. And you I remember you mentioned your father was an architect. Yes, that's correct. And then I think it's knowledge explains everything knowledge explains why you become an artist and process professor of art, or maybe this over simplified, but it was a family background in art and art and crafts and had a significant impact in your early career choice. And how early did you know you want to become an artist? I didn't know that I wanted to become an artist for a very long time. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I went off to graduate school or well, I mean, excuse me, to undergraduate school, as a terrible student in high school. I was graduating 34th percentile of my graduating high school class. Then not too bad. Professor, where were you born? Where did you grow up? I was born in Washington, Washington, D.C. Okay. And where did you grow up? D.C. I for the 1942. And so he was stationed in Washington, D.C. when I was born. And then we moved to they he was then went to Texas and then they moved to Milwaukee. And I lived with well, my mom and my brother were in the house that belonged to my grandmother, who had, you know, now my father lived there. So when he was gone, we were there during the army or during the military service in the in World War Two. But I always, you know, was, you know, my brother and I drew all the time would get up in the morning and spend hours, you know, sort of drawing things. My brother was a very had a much better risk than I did, meaning that he was, you know, sort of very accurate. I, you know, sort of had a tent there. And I also began to model things in clay, you know, essentially making clay just some dirt in the backyard, and using wet clay on a wire armature and problem is that it would dry up and so on. So I'd make another one and another one and another one. I liked it very much. I was always interested in making things and sort of building things. So it was an old foot treadle lathe in the basement that belonged to my grandfather that I started to use and learned how to use. And I learned to turn brass into objects and my objects at the time, because I was interested in history, particularly military history, the sort of cannons on British warships. And so I would make models of those. I would make working models of those. And so from that point on, it was a matter of realizing that my interest had to do with history, had to do with literature, and had to do with the nature of how we come to understand or how we come to experience in real life, the things that we read about or the things that we've heard about. You know, the idea that learning how to use this lathe was totally done on my own. Fortunately, I didn't kill myself. May I interrupt? Because you already answered my next question. The next question is to describe, please describe the artistic style and the themes that inspire your work. You answered that question perfectly. But I don't want to just fit in this question right here, because we are talking about your art already, that you work with, in my view, I'm an art critic and art historian by training. So I like your artwork a lot. And I think you work with a variety of media, and be it photography and painting and drawing and installation, which medium and you prefer to work with. And how do the choice of medium contribute to the message you want to convey through your artwork? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that when I'm thinking about something, for example, this book that I did about my grandfather's architecture, I had really no idea of how to do it. In a sense, what I mean by that is it evolved, it comes to life as you begin to think about it. And so when I'm working on anything, the project I'm working on right now is itself as an idea, as a simple what if. And I've always been interested in, what if I did this, what would this look like, what if I did that, what if I did this, and if I did it in this, what would it look like? It was a wonderful piece that Klaus Oldenburg did on a piece that he was doing. He made a model in wood, he made it in metal, he made it in a whole bunch of stuff. He also made it in smoke salmon, just to see something about texture and so on. So I've always been interested in the material in some way has a voice in the thing. And so with my grandfather, that book that I was doing with him, on him or on that work, had to be used with architectural drafting cloth. But where to find antique drafting cloth. And I, it spent a long time trying to find it. When I finally did, was horrible to work with in the means that were available to me now. It took an enormous amount of effort and, you know, sort of work to clean it and do all this. But it was the only choice I had to make, because I wanted that. So that was the sort of pivotal piece once I started that. So most of the things that I work on, whether it's installations or whether it's photographs or whether it's, you know, any whatever it is, it has a great deal to do with, it has to have something that connects with the idea. My overall thinking, just wanted to say this, my overall thinking has to do with some element of atmosphere and an element of darkness or of shadow, something which is evocative. And so the materials by that means are evocative. Stones, for example, are evoke, particular sort of traditions of burial or traditions of various things that have to do, perhaps with my grandfather and father's stone cutting. I was never stoned also another one, the idea that something is weighty, casting an iron or casting in some other material. I never have chosen a material as the only one. So that's why there is the installation, there's the photographs, there's all, sometimes they're all combined together. Excellent. And I found your artwork is hard to define. And please take that as a complement, because of greatness, it's very hard to define. And the best artist almost always have multiple identities and it's difficult to define in a particular category or fit in a particular label. But Mike, I'm out of curiosity that you are, you studied art in in college and in graduate school as well. And looking back in the history of your particular artist and art movement have a more influential impact on your art practice and your art journey than others. What are your favorite artists and art movement? Well, I love surrealism. I love dadaism. I can tell, yeah. I've always been very interested in modernism as an idea. I never thought of modernism as a thing. It's a way that, you know, sort of it's the notion of a continual change. And so I evolved essentially from a figurative artist. I still in many ways think of myself as a figurative artist. Because what I'm interested in is if you walk or by a person or by a human being. So if you walk into a house or an apartment or whatever, it has a kind of reference. And in many ways that reference is there by its smell, its light, its lack of light, its scale, all these things. And, you know, sort of I grew up in a house that was designed by my grandfather. It had an attic. It had a big attic. It had a living space at a bedroom, you know, floor area. And it had a basement with an old, you know, sort of this was he built it. I lived there when I grew up. It was built in 1906. It originally had gas lighting as well as electricity. He was a somewhat of an inventor. He had built a dark room in there. So I screwed around with all kinds of stuff. Very often very dangerous things. I started the house on fire, particularly working with hot, hot wax. I mean, fortunately, the house didn't catch on fire, but you know, the room did. I set curtains on fire, all kinds of things. I've always been interested in, you know, sort of trial and error. Yeah, wonderful. We have a few minutes left, but I do have a couple more questions. And the question one is, and you have a long and successful career in art and being recognized artist nationally and internationally, and also a professor of our tiny professor of art at the U of M. And not all the artists will be, I would say, lucky, so to speak, to have such a great career. And what advice you would give to aspiring young artists who want to make art of their life and in their career? And what advice do you give them? Keep an open mind and be curious, always curious. Keep your eyes open. Also, it takes a while to figure out what it is that you want. It's more important to know what you don't want. I knew what I didn't want, but I never, you know, always hard to know what I wanted. And so all of that is one of those things when I was teaching, I would always, you know, sort of ask somebody, well, why did you go to this movie and not that movie? Or why did you go to a movie and not a play? Or why did you dot dot dot dot dot dot dot? And, you know, sort of the idea that you think about these things is not a strategy. It's just, it's nice to wonder backwards and say, I wonder why I did that. I wonder what that was about. That was essentially the basis of my teaching strategy. And so it's one of the things that I suggested to people when they finish school, they're going to graduate school, go to a different school than the one you went for undergraduate school. Try a different space, try a different place, get new information. And now the quick follow-up that that was one advice you gave to the young artist about what advice you would give to a younger self, you yourself, if time travel permitted, you could travel back to your early 20s. And what advice you would give to yourself? Don't be so afraid. And it took me a long, long time to get over my insecurities. You had insecurities. That's a surprise. You are one of the most courageous artists I have met. Well, thank you very much. And last question, but not the least question. And you have a very high level of intellectual curiosity. You mentioned that during the show, you open-minded. And I just want to have an open-ended question. What particular recommendation, something you enjoy at the moment? Books, movies, drama, documentary, you want to recommend it to our audience? Well, I read Simon Schama's The Landscape of Memory. Landscape of Memory. It's a wonderful book. I recommend it highly. Is it nonfiction? Nonfiction. Written by Simon Schama, who is a historian. That's because we have one minute left. You mentioned the book about memory. I do want to ask you about this. And do you think our memory will continue to exist? And can memory be passed? Can memory be immortal? Can memory be passed from one generation to another generation? And can memory can be solidified in the form of art or form of literature? I think it can. I mean, it certainly has so far. You know, the technology changes so fast that things that I've done on videotape years ago are, you know, pretty much nobody has any way to see them anymore. But you can still buy a book or you can still do a variety of other things. So, you know, I think that memory and history evolve largely through looking at art and the things that have been done, art and architecture, are critical. And it's foolish to think that that we live primarily only in one time. We live for a very long time. I mean, throughout history. Wonderful. Splendid. Thank you so much, Art. Make us immortal. And thank you, Professor, being an artist and being an art educator. We're lucky to have you in Minnesota. Thank you so much for your time. And I look forward to your next art exhibition and have a wonderful day, Professor. Well, you too. I thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's a lot of fun. Same here. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.