A Rose Is

FEBRUARY 27-JUNE 21, 2025

Opening reception: Thursday, February 27, 6-8 PM

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce A Rose Is, an expansive group exhibition that examines the ubiquity and multivalent meaning of the rose throughout art history and visual culture. Across a wide array of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and text, the exhibition considers the rose in all of its symbolic and ritual complexity, ultimately seeking to complicate our familiarity with it as a vehicle for consumption and desire.

Artists include: Farah Al Qasimi, Polly Apfelbaum, Arakawa & Madeline Gins, Genesis Belanger, Louise Bourgeois, Joe Brainard, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Ann Craven, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Jay DeFeo, Ethyl Eichelberger, Awol Erizku, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tony Feher, Allison Janae Hamilton, Gabriella Hirst, Peter Hujar, John Jarboe, Anna Jermolaewa, Sarah Jones, Anselm Kiefer, Lee Krasner, Dr. Lakra, Linder, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Katie Paterson, Nicolas Party, Kay Rosen, James Rosenquist, Taryn Simon, Charles Sheeler, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, among others.

Drawing inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental, four-part painting The Rose III (2008), the exhibition situates the rose—both physically and figuratively—as an icon of beauty, enticement, excess, and abjection, all at the same time. Set against a vibrant turquoise backdrop, three purple, yellow, and tangerine roses overflow and drip down the face of the first three panels of the twenty-five-foot-long canvas, with the fourth panel containing text fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Roses (1926). Through an ecstatic combination of scale, color, and form, Twombly allows viewers to see the lushness and vitality of the roses while also contemplating their diminishment.

The literary and linguistic life of the rose is explored throughout the exhibition. From excerpted stanzas from Rilke’s poem to the language games found in Kay Rosen’s A Rose Is (1978/2025)—itself a reference to the line “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” from Gertrude Stein’s poem Sacred Emily (1913)—the rose is framed as an idea, just as much as a perishable object to be given or received. Rosen’s large scale, fuchsia text on FLAG’s opening wall, as well as the photo-text work from which it is derived, casts the rose as a word to explore the tenuous relationship between concepts and the objects they point to. Leaning into Stein’s sensibility that “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do,” Rosen repeats the word rose again and again throughout her poem, such that new phonetic sounds are produced and with them new directions of meaning and imagery as well. Rather than imagine the rose solely as a flower, or in relation to the ideas of consumption and desire only, Rosen captures its complexity as so much of the work included in A Rose Is does: as a malleable and historically layered entity open to contradiction and revision.

Throughout the exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the flower as a site of overlapping and contradictory meanings. Though the combination of advertising and cultural ritual has made the rose synonymous with Valentine’s Day and romantic gestures more broadly, it has equally strong associations with funeral processions and end-of-life commemorations. James Lee Byars’s sculpture Rose Table of Perfect (1989) highlights this duality, as 3,333 freshly cut red roses are studded into a perfect red sphere, only to fade and eventually die over the course of the exhibition. Like the Twombly painting, Byars’s sculpture complicates our familiarity with the rose by combining its conventionality with its ultimate undoing. As a foil, Tony Feher’s funeral wreath Saint Rosalie Intercedes on Behalf of the Plague Victims of Palermo (1991) positions white plastic roses into a perfect circle, creating a dime-store gesture that will never diminish. Equal parts glamorous and devastating is Peter Hujar’s photograph Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973), made at the performer’s invitation on the occasion of her inevitable passing due to terminal illness. Surrounded by lavish flower arrangements—as if in her dressing room after a show—Darling is recumbent under dramatic lighting, wrapped in hospital bed sheets, her make-up just so, with a single long-stem red rose lying next to her failing body.

Just as the rose is a natural form called upon to reinforce human connection, so too is it a commercial form used to advertise and sell products globally. Sara Cwynar’s video Rose Gold (2017), displayed in a black-box room on the second floor of the exhibition, examines this facet of the rose as an artificial construct that produces tangible reactions. Made in response to the release of Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone, the video mines the history of product development and color theory, making both the color itself and the products it is used for seem glossy and attractive, while also calling attention to their status as kitsch objects of a clichéd consumerism. Further complicating the romantic connotation of the rose is Taryn Simon’s Framework agreement for economic cooperation. Quito, Ecuador, January 12, 2012, 2015, Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015). The title of the work refers to the agreement between Ecuador and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), situating the rose as a witness to politics, governance, and globalization. Further expanding the cultural history of the rose and the rose as witness is Gabriella Hirst’s How to Make A Bomb (2015-ongoing). In response to a 1950s species of rose called Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb,’ Hirst developed an interactive artwork wherein community members graft from the ‘Atomic Rose’ and surreptitiously plant the flower in public spaces, injecting the flower into collective consciousness as a vehicle for political violence.

FLAG would like to acknowledge the participating artists, artist estates, galleries, and private lenders for their generous loans of artworks to this exhibition.

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