Publications
Allan Rosenfield: Fluid - Between Surface and Space
Through May 31, 2026
Allan Rosenfield’s work is shaped by a life of movement and cultural encounter. From early studies in Rome, travels through Europe, the Middle East, and Israel, to extended time in Japan as a Fulbright Research Fellow, and later decades in the American West before settling in Pittsburgh, Rosenfield’s practice embodies a diasporic way of making; absorbing, translating, and carrying visual knowledge across places and cultures. The methods, sensibilities, and possibilities he has gathered through his travels remain present in the work, not as motifs, but as lived experience. His approach is fluid, open in mind and process, receptive to new ideas and forms, and deliberately unrigid. He strives to get out of the way of his own making so that the paintings may discover themselves, allowing form, color, and gesture to emerge organically rather than through over-intellectualization.
The influence of the East is evident in the kimono-like shapes of Rosenfield’s draped canvases, while his engagement with Western modernism—particularly Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting—appears in expansive, contemplative fields of pigment, gestural mark-making, and luminous, flat surfaces. Monumental yet approachable, these works are simultaneously impressive and comforting, large enough to invite meditation yet intimate in their suggestion of ritual and bodily presence.
Rosenfield’s paintings occupy a space between disciplines. Neither purely painting nor sculpture, they exist as objects with physical presence while remaining rooted in paint, surface, and gesture. Their scale encourages a bodily encounter: viewers approach them as they might approach a wall, a garment, or an architectural threshold. The draped forms evoke sacred textiles without prescribing a single tradition; they could be kimono, a prophet’s robe, or a tallit.
Each of these references carries specific cultural and spiritual resonance. The kimono, worn for ceremonial occasions, symbolizes Japanese culture, identity, and the intricate language of pattern and gesture. The tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, facilitates meditation and spiritual focus, its fringes (tzitzit) reminding worshippers of divine commandments. A prophet’s robe represents consecration, authority, and the life of one called to deliver spiritual guidance, often suggesting a life set apart from worldly concerns. In Rosenfield’s work, these evocations are deliberately ambiguous: the draped canvases can simultaneously suggest meditation, authority, protection, and ritual, inviting viewers to consider what the form might do, whom or what it enfolds, and how it mediates presence.
Many of the works are equipped with grommets, weighted or folded like protective tarps, and their thick, stiff, resilient surfaces reinforce a sense of shelter, care, and durability. Hung across bark or suspended in space, the openings, edges, and folds emphasize thresholds—what is revealed or concealed—and draw attention to the relational space between viewer and object. In this ambiguity, the paintings function as portals: large, contemplative expanses of color designed to evoke meditation, reflection, and spiritual engagement, echoing the mid-20th-century vision of painting as a gateway into other worlds.
Interspersed among these monumental works are smaller circular paintings Rosenfield calls Rounds. Intimate in scale, the Rounds condense the same formal and conceptual concerns into a concentrated form. The circle—resonant across cultures as mandala, seal, or ritual object—becomes a site of focus, balance, and repetition. Together, the draped canvases and Rounds establish a rhythm of expansion and contraction, outward presence and inward reflection.
Throughout the exhibition, Rosenfield engages shared visual languages of repetition, verticality, enclosure, and protection. His works function as thresholds—simultaneously surface and space, boundary and opening—inviting viewers into moments of contemplation rather than fixed interpretation.
In a gallery devoted to exploring Jewish art through lived experience and subjectivity—the “-ish” rather than the absolute—Rosenfield’s work resonates profoundly. Like diaspora itself, these paintings resist singular definition. Meaning remains fluid, shaped by movement, memory, and the viewer’s own way of entering the space between worlds, where care, presence, and spiritual resonance converge.
-Melissa Hiller, American Jewish Museum Director
Appreciating the Art of Allan Rosenfield
A&U Magazine is a monthly publication with a nationwide readership that focuses on all aspects of the AIDS crisis. His writings on the visual, written, and performing arts have appeared in publications from coast to coast.
To encounter the art of Allan Rosenfield is to enter a world of seductive color, shape, and texture. It’s not just beautiful to the eye but—surprisingly enough for work situated four-square within a painterly tradition—appealing to the sense of touch as well. This is true whether the art that you're encountering is his signature canvas-shaped-as-kimono pieces that are draped to hang from horizontal poles, his "flat" paintings and drawings on canvas and board framed to hang on walls, or his brightly colored gourds.
Rosenfield’s dual approach is no accident. In a discussion about his art, he told me, “I always encourage people who see my work to touch it. The pieces aren’t just color for the eye; they’re tactile for the hand. I like to think that even a blind person could touch them and get something out of them. I encourage owners of my hangings to try their own arrangements. I say, “Change the painting, change the mood.”
This is hardly the typical gallery or museum attitude, where the rule is: "Look at the art and interpret it, but never touch or change it."
Just why Rosenfield likes to create art that is both visual and tactile is less an aesthetic question than a psychological one, but the result is lushly colored, evocatively shaped pieces that escape the box of conventional art categories. Rosenfield’s work also escapes the eastern art/western art divide by incorporating elements of both.
To those familiar with his art, it should come as no surprise that he studied for a time on a Fulbright Fellowship at Osaka University of the Arts, interested mainly in Japanese calligraphy and ideograms as art forms. According to Rosenfield, "What primarily attracts me is the great fluidity and freedom of expression that Japanese artists allow themselves within a set of very rigidly defined and imposed rules, to see how they have traditionally gone about breaking their own rules to create something new, totally new hybrids. "In a way that's what I'm doing: creating new, hybrid art."
The eastern influence on Rosenfield's art is clear in the kimono-like shapes of his draped canvases. The western influences are equally clear in the touch of expressionist abstraction that you see in those same pieces, as well as the great swaths of color field pigments in which they're awash. One hears about "fusion cuisines" that bring together the great traditions of Asian cooking. Perhaps one could refer to Rosenfield's work as "fusion art that offers viewers new insights into beauty and enduring grandeur of art in both eastern and western traditions.
Which brings me to a final point in this appreciation of Allan Rosenfield's art. In our discussion, I asked him what is at the center of his artistic ambition. He responded, "I would say beauty. Beauty is at the core of everything that I do artistically."
This is a simple enough answer, but startling in terms of today's art world where reaching for the new, the unexpected, the bizarre, even the shocking seems to be the norm among artists always looking for ways to capture the attention of a jaded art market that is ready to bestow great rewards on artistic inventiveness. Rosenfield's art is neither shocking nor bizarre. It is, however, fresh, inventive, and, unexpectedly in the contemporary art world, emphasizes a beauty it insists on sharing with viewers.
In this respect, it's worth quoting Rosenfield again from our discussion about his art. He said, "I think beauty has been given a bum rap by a lot of folks in the art and academic establishments in the last thirty years; but it's the one really transcendent quality about art that can speak to everybody, to every viewer across the board, and be really, really universal."
Beauty gets no bum rap in Rosenfield's work, which is fortunate indeed for those who are lucky enough to encounter his art, see it, even touch it, and find that it speaks to them, or perhaps, touches them back.
Lester Strong, Special Projects Editor of A&U Magazine
Commenting on the exhibit “Full Circle” at the Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Artist Allan Rosenfield’s “Big, Round, Red” with its big red circle on a yellow background commanded attention. The work on canvas tarp draped and hung in mid-air gives it a ghostly quality. The canvas is painted with stripes on one side and draped so that the red circle is not fully displayed. Rosenfield explained that the circle was intentionally obscured on the sides because “you never get to see as much as you want.”
Big, Round, Red
Tyler Dague, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 13, 2021
A&U Magazine is a monthly publication with a nationwide readership that focuses on all aspects of the AIDS crisis. His writings on the visual, written, and performing arts have appeared in publications from coast to coast.
To encounter the art of Allan Rosenfield is to enter a world of seductive color, shape, and texture. It’s not just beautiful to the eye but—surprisingly enough for work situated four-square within a painterly tradition—appealing to the sense of touch as well. This is true whether the art that you're encountering is his signature canvas-shaped-as-kimono pieces that are draped to hang from horizontal poles, his "flat" paintings and drawings on canvas and board framed to hang on walls, or his brightly colored gourds.
Rosenfield’s dual approach is no accident. In a discussion about his art, he told me, “I always encourage people who see my work to touch it. The pieces aren’t just color for the eye; they’re tactile for the hand. I like to think that even a blind person could touch them and get something out of them. I encourage owners of my hangings to try their own arrangements. I say, “Change the painting, change the mood.”
This is hardly the typical gallery or museum attitude, where the rule is: "Look at the art and interpret it, but never touch or change it."
Just why Rosenfield likes to create art that is both visual and tactile is less an aesthetic question than a psychological one, but the result is lushly colored, evocatively shaped pieces that escape the box of conventional art categories. Rosenfield’s work also escapes the eastern art/western art divide by incorporating elements of both.
To those familiar with his art, it should come as no surprise that he studied for a time on a Fulbright Fellowship at Osaka University of the Arts, interested mainly in Japanese calligraphy and ideograms as art forms. According to Rosenfield, "What primarily attracts me is the great fluidity and freedom of expression that Japanese artists allow themselves within a set of very rigidly defined and imposed rules, to see how they have traditionally gone about breaking their own rules to create something new, totally new hybrids. "In a way that's what I'm doing: creating new, hybrid art."
The eastern influence on Rosenfield's art is clear in the kimono-like shapes of his draped canvases. The western influences are equally clear in the touch of expressionist abstraction that you see in those same pieces, as well as the great swaths of color field pigments in which they're awash. One hears about "fusion cuisines" that bring together the great traditions of Asian cooking. Perhaps one could refer to Rosenfield's work as "fusion art that offers viewers new insights into the beauty and enduring grandeur of art in both eastern and western traditions.
Which brings me to a final point in this appreciation of Allan Rosenfield's art. In our discussion, I asked him what is at the center of his artistic ambition. He responded, "I would say beauty. Beauty is at the core of everything that I do artistically."
This is a simple enough answer, but startling in terms of today's art world, where reaching for the new, the unexpected, the bizarre, even the shocking seems to be the norm among artists always looking for ways to capture the attention of a jaded art market that is ready to bestow great rewards on artistic inventiveness. Rosenfield's art is neither shocking nor bizarre. It is, however, fresh, inventive, and, unexpectedly, in the contemporary art world, emphasizes a beauty it insists on sharing with viewers.
In this respect, it's worth quoting Rosenfield again from our discussion about his art. He said, "I think beauty has been given a bum rap by a lot of folks in the art and academic establishments in the last thirty years; but it's the one really transcendent quality about art that can speak to everybody, to every viewer across the board, and be really, really universal."
Beauty gets no bum rap in Rosenfield's work, which is fortunate indeed for those who are lucky enough to encounter his art, see it, even touch it, and find that it speaks to them, or perhaps, touches them back.
Lester Strong, Special Projects Editor of A&U Magazine
“These always remind me of an abstract kimono or a Bedouin tent or, even, a robe for a prophet. They are a provocative, yet comforting, presence when displayed in a room.”
Peter Grahame, Art Critic and Independent Curator
"Lush colors, evocative shapes, art that is visually stimulating and designed to tease the viewer's imagination without dictating all of the parameters of what those perceptions should be. You enter Allan's creative world at your own risk, but the pleasures are always worth the risks."
Lester Strong, Special Projects Editor, Arts & Understanding Magazine