Martha Rosler in Conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson

Pratt Fine Arts’ Civic Engagement Series

Organized by Alex Strada, Fine Arts Civic Engagement Fellow

Pratt is honored to welcome artist Martha Rosler and art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson for a conversation exploring Rosler’s powerful, politically engaged work on urbanism, women, war, and forms of resistance.

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches contemporary art and gender studies at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, most recently Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (2023). As Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, she has co-curated several exhibitions, including Queer Histories (with Adriano Pedrosa and André Mesquita, 2024). In November 2025 she opens two shows—GUTSY: On Feminist Infrastructure (at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw) and Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces (at the Wallach Art Gallery, organized with Natalia Brizuela). She interviewed Martha Rosler for the Distinguished Artist Lecture at the 2025 College Art Association annual conference.

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler’s practice focuses on issues of the public sphere, addressing cultural and political concerns both domestic and foreign-often through the feminist lens of their impact on the lives of women. For over six decades, Rosler has worked in a variety of media—including video, photography, text, sculpture, performance, and writing—always expanding upon her practice in an ongoing endeavor to incite questions of perception and truth as they relate to an ever-changing sociopolitical landscape. Among the many topics investigated throughout her oeuvre, recurring themes in Rosler’s practice include urbanism, spaces of transit, war and national security, and patriarchal expectations of women. Her work invites consideration and critique of the systems governing everyday life, including those that often go unnoticed. In addition to her artistic practice, Rosler’s incisive commentary extends to her written work, in published books and essays as well as contributions to newspapers and critical publications.

Rosler’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions globally, with notable institutional solo presentations including at the Tate Modern, London (2022); Museum of Recent Art (MARe), Bucharest, Romania (2022); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile (2019); The Jewish Museum, New York (2018); the Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France (2002); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000); the New Museum, New York (2000); MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (1999); and the Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989). A retrospective of her work toured five venues in Europe and the United States between 1998 and 2000. Her exhibition on housing, homelessness, and the built environment, which encompasses contributions by many individuals and groups, has been mounted many times throughout the past two decades, including most recently at the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy (2024). The Martha Rosler Library, a selection of over 7,000 titles in Rosler’s personal collection, has toured eight venues across Europe and the United States. Rosler has also published 17 books of photography, art, and writing, in several languages. Her work is featured in scores of public collections globally, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate Modern, London, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Rosler is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award, Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, and a United States Artists Nimoy Fellowship, among many others.

Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, where she was born.

Photo: Martha Rosler. Housing is a Human Right, March 1989. Times Square Spectacolor signboard animation, 1:10 min. Public Art Fund, New York. © Martha Rosler