ARTIST Edo Rosenblith
TITLE A Seat at the Table
LOCATION Soll’s Gateway Market – 1206 Kingshighway Blvd
WARD 10
FOLLOW @edorosenblith
MURAL LOCATION COMING SOON
ABOUT EDO ROSENBLITH
The majority of my artwork weaves together disparate accounts of my own experiences and observations filtered through the lens of a personalized visual language. Over time, I have gravitated towards populist mediums such as murals, books/zines, and printmaking as different arenas to employ my artistry. For over ten years, a significant part of my art practice has been creating murals and large-scale commissioned work throughout the St. Louis Metropolitan area. I’ve been commissioned over twenty times to create artworks for clients as varied as the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Center for Creative Arts (COCA), Parkway Central High School, The Luminary Center for the Arts, The Chess Hall of Fame, Project + Gallery, The Foundry Art Center, The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, Stag Beer, Angad Art Hotel, TechArtista, The Terrain Biennial, and Bengelina Hospitality Group.
In 2010, I first learned the craft of mural making as an assistant for the artist Steven Westfall, a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Working with Westfall demystified the mural-making process. Instead of creating intimacy with the viewer through small-scaled imagery found on paper, I now engulf the viewer with wall-sized compositions. The results are often a dense Where’s Waldo-like composition, where viewers select imagery from a thick web of figures and faces and make meaning and associations on their own. The intention is to provide a maximalist approach designed to reward the viewer the more the work is examined. When I look back on all my mural work, what unites all these different projects is that my approach to each one is to create imagery informed by the architecture and community where the work is located. Once I am given a site for the mural, I populate the surface of the wall or panel with imagery of the very people who would or could occupy that space. My murals do not act as “windows” into another world but more as “mirrors” to the area they directly inhabit. For example, when my High School Art teacher commissioned me to create a large painting for the school, I reasoned that since the site sits across from the school’s cafeteria, the subject of that work became real-life students from the school eating lunch surrounded by imagery sourced directly from photos taken by these very same students. Ultimately, the goal is to create art that feels like an open dialogue between the artist and the public. I know an artwork is successful when people who live or work around the mural see it as an essential element of their built environment and feel that my artwork has, in essence, “always been there.”