Art Rosenbaum, 1938-2022

The UGA campus and community grieves the loss of a great educator, artist, musician and friend with the passing of Art Rosenbaum on September 4.

For thirty years, the late professor emeritus Art Rosenbaum instructed a generation of painters at the Lamar Dodd School of Art with an eye toward bold, layered compositions that highlighted the interiority of his subjects and the dynamic landscape of folk traditions and personhood in the South. Rosenbaum was a singular artist whose influence spanned the visual arts, music, and folklore studies:

Art Rosenbaum was born in 1938 in Ogdensburg, New York and earned his AB in Art History and his MFA in Painting at Columbia University. He was a distinguished faculty member in drawing and painting at the School of Art from 1976-2006. Rosenbaum also worked in France on a Fulbright Fellowship in Painting and had held a Fulbright Senior Professorship in Germany. His accomplished teaching earned him recognition as the university’s first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts.

UGA’s first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts, Rosenbaum embodied everything one could imagine in an accomplished life of creating, teaching, sharing, and preserving. His marks and and his music cast a grand shadow far the beyond our campus, but we are honored that he and his wife Margo Newmark Rosenbaum made Athens and UGA their home.

Image: author photo of Rosenbaum with his mural 'Doors'