Bio
BIOGRAPHY
Roshan Houshmand is an Iranian/American artist and educator who was born in the Philippines in 1961, and raised there and in Iran until 1976. She received her BA from Bennington College in 1982, and her MA and MFA from Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts, Dominican University in 1983 and 1984. A lifelong learner, Roshan later studied privately in New York City with Julio Alpuy of the Taller Torres Garcia School of Universal Constructivism. More recently, Roshan studied at the Shechen Monastery’s Tsering Art School in Nepal.
Roshan’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. Her work was exhibited
in the exhibition TOTEM at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. Works from her series Under the Bodhi Tree were featured at MEAM (the Museum of European Modern Art) in Barcelona; at the Taubman Gallery at Michigan University; at Museo Mazzoni in Maldonado, Uruguay; and at MuHar (Museum of Art History) in Montevideo, Uruguay. Her painting Thus I Have Heard was featured in Italia Docet/Laboratorium, as a collaborative event of the 56th Venice Biennale, and her mixed-media work The Red Dress was exhibited as a part of 21st Century American Women Artists at the U.S.Mission to NATO in Belgium.
Her awards include the Special Merit Recognition Award for the Representation of Scienti c/ Mathematical Principle and Phenomena at “SMARTART” at the Next Big Idea in Los Alamos
for her painting Theoretical Event. She also received the Susan Asarian Nickerson Social Commentary Honorable Mention Award for her work The Cage, exhibited at WAAM (Woodstock Artists Association and Museum) in Woodstock, NY.
Roshan currently teaches as an online adjunct drawing instructor at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and works in Andes, NY. For more information, please visit www.roshanhoushmand.com.
Links:
Miriam’s Well: Poetry, Land Art and Beyond
”Roshan Houshmand’s paintings clearly indicate her interest in (these) eternal issues. It is the world
of the mind and spirit rather than of the physical and material. The paintings are freely created with a eld full of paint and symbols. The surface is more of a tablet for notation and evocation than for any concern with perspective or didactic. The free paint application creates a misty, dreamlike environment that allows movement and a certain vagueness. One is tempted to interpret this perception as a magical surface that contains the embodiment of ritual, dream and mystery. They are so represented that the concept of voodoo readily comes to mind. From an art historical perspective, early Rothko, and particularly Gottlieb, paintings present a painted surface and symbols which are more structured and controlled. One is tempted to read their work like hieroglyphics, whereas here one takes Roshan’s work as a totality of parts which exist within the context or the work rather than on their own.”
Roger L. Selby, Boca Raton Museum of Art, 1990
“Roshan Houshmand’s abstract muted oils resonate with painterly nuances of opaline delicacy. Strewn with a welter of iconic shapes and forms, and rendered in chromatic tones of faded glory, these convey a sense of portentous ruins, like reliquary frescoes from the ancient religious mystery. Houshmand’s cosmology is subtly female, softly evocative and almost hermetically abstract. Indeed, in this transcendent series of abstract paintings, Houshmand seems a kind of recording angel of lost and faded mysteries.”
Eric Bookhardt, Gambit, New Orleans,1990
“Roshan Houshmand’s paintings are melodic fusions of the eastern and western traditions. And here lies the vigor of her art; to make the east a metaphor of the west and vice versa. Eastern textile designs, subtlest of mutations, are transformed dramatically to assume familiar shapes. Familiar only because the images speak with the appropriate elan for the western context of experience. The mood evoked is a perfect and harmonious mixture of the inexplicable mystery of Persian gardens and the transcendent spirituality of the western abstraction. All attained in the most original of schemes and with eclecticism sedulously proscribed. Never before have these dichotomous spirits been so contiguous and their boundaries so inseparably fused.”
Abbas Daneshvari, Author, Art Historian, 2004
"Of all the artists I know, Roshan Houshmand is the only one whose paintings are both in my house and in my office on campus.”
Miriam Sagan, Author, Poet, 2016
“The painting Hamsa (by Roshan Houshmand) is something we have come to treasure as we light our sabbath candles beneath it, every Friday night, and my four kids have really become attached to it."
Mrs. Haney, Wife of Ambassador Haney, 2017
Photo by Jackie Parslow