Biography

Rogers has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including one-person exhibitions at major galleries and museums in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Scottsdale, Germany and the United Arab Emirates. Her work is in major public and private collections including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Oakland Museum of Art, The San Jose Museum of Art and The ASU Museum.

Barbara Rogers was born in a rural community in Northern Ohio. She attended the Canton, Ohio public schools graduating in Commercial Art from Timken High School. On a sunny August morning in 1959, she graduated from Ohio State with a B.Sc. in Art Education and left for California in the evening.

In California she studied painting at The San Francisco Art Institute with Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. She studied life drawing with Nathan Oliviera at California College of Arts and Crafts.  She received the Eisner Prize and her MA in Painting from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. At UC Berkeley she studied with NY painters Michael Goldberg and Angelo Ippolito.  Her major professor was painter, Felix Ruvolo.

After a year of painting and teaching in New York, she began her teaching career at UC Berkeley in 1965 and also taught at San Jose State University before becoming a Full Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program and the Painting, Ceramics and Sculpture Program at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been a visiting artist at many public and private schools including The University of Washington, St. Mary’s/Notre Dame, University of Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, Cooper Union and the University of Kansas.  In 1990 she joined the Painting and Drawing Faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson where she is a Professor in the School of Art.

Using the metaphor of the garden, her current work addresses the issues of the life cycle, chaos and order, landscape and abstraction in both painting and photography.   She sees the importance of the garden as a fundamental pivot where nature and culture convene and where personal desires can assume political significance.

“Rogers has moved from a conception of nature as a contrivance for exotic romance to an idea of nature as the powerful provenance of creation and destruction.  A single unified super-real style has been replaced by a layering of styles, which vibrantly suggests the very modern history of the possibilities of representational art.  We find in these works, as in our own often feeble conceptions of nature - as garden, country, or sublime wilderness - constructions which emerge from a yearning for a spiritual and ecological completeness in the face of the fragmentation of our psychic selves in the plethora of images which are so many simulations of the natural, the romantic,- the so called real.  Rogers’ work has left an experience of the fragility and power of nature.  It might suggest the importance of our own engagement in the protection and veneration of the natural environment.”