Ed Rossbach, Broadened Art Boundaries With Textiles, 88

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Ed Rossbach, a pioneer of the contemporary fiber-arts movement who
pushed the boundaries of traditional textile techniques and influenced a
generation of young fiber artists, has died on October 7, 2002, at the
age of 88, after a long illness.

Rossbach was a professor emeritus of design at UC Berkeley, where he
taught for 29 years.

The essence of Rossbach's art, as one writer put it, was in
"transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary."

Although he used a variety of centuries-old basketry techniques, he was
a pioneer in using nontraditional, often whimsical materials, including
metal foil, plastic bread bags, Mylar, rice paper, twigs, spray lacquer,
ash splints, heat transfers, natural wood fibers, ribbon, tape, staples,
twine -- and newspaper.

Like the ancients who used readily available river reeds to make their
baskets, Rossbach found that the availability of newspaper in
contemporary society made it a particularly appealing material to work
with.

He just happened "to like it, the texture, the sense of ordinariness of
it," he said in an interview for the 1990 book "Ed Rossbach, 40 Years of
Exploration and Innovation in Fiber Art," which was produced for a
retrospective of his work at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C.

Of one of his baskets made of coiled newspaper, he said, "I was not
remotely interested in seeming clever or in making a statement about
newspapers in our society; yet when the baskets were finished, the
letters and words and fragments of illustrations added a peculiar force.
They seem to speak out with an undeniable message."

"His baskets were incredible," said Inez Brooks-Myers, curator of
costume and textiles at the Oakland Museum of California and a former
student of Rossbach's.

"He was innovative, using throwaway materials for his baskets," she
said, "but he also was innovative in his other weaving, where he would
apply really old textile techniques in a very modern pop-culture,
provocative way.

"The pieces he did with images of John Travolta and Mickey Mouse were
marvelous. He was a scholar and yet he enjoyed popular culture."

Early Mickey Mouse drawings appeared periodically in Rossbach's work; he
reportedly co-opted the world's famous rodent in response to snide
remarks about his classes and occupation being "Mickey Mouse."

Added Brooks-Myers, who studied under Rossbach in the 1970s: "He was
really a wonderful man and a marvelous teacher who listened to his
students and challenged them in the most positive way."

Born in Edison Park, Ill., Rossbach grew up in the Chicago suburb of
LaGrange, where he displayed an early artistic bent.

He never forgot the praise he received from his mother as a boy when he
made a card-table cloth with three designed block prints in each corner.

"It's terribly important at a very early age, the appreciation that
someone expresses toward your work," he told a former student who
interviewed him in 1996 for her doctorate thesis.

Rossbach earned a bachelor's degree in painting and design from the
University of Washington in Seattle in 1940 and a master's degree in art
education from Columbia University's Teacher's College in 1941.

He served in the Army Signal Corps in Alaska's Aleutian Islands during
World War II and, after earning a master's of fine arts degree in
weaving and ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills,
Mich., in 1947, he began teaching painting and design at the University
of Washington.

"I had to earn a living," he said in the 1996 interview. "I contemplated
doing just art, but I was a shy person, and I could not imagine myself
going with a portfolio of my art."

Rossbach, who joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1950 and retired in
1979, received a gold medal for highest achievement in craftsmanship
from the American Craft Council.

His fiber-artist wife, Katherine Westphal, a UC Davis emeritus professor
of design, is also considered a seminal figure in contemporary fiber
arts.

The UC Davis Design Museum recently concluded a "retro" exhibit of
hand-painted textiles by Rossbach and Westphal from the 1950s to the
1970s.

"Ties That Bind," an exhibit of work by Rossbach and Westphal that ran
at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997-98, continues to tour the
country.

Rossbach's textiles are part of collections in numerous museums,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Modern
Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art
Museum's Renwick Gallery and the Stedelijik Museum in Amsterdam, as well
as in many private collections.

Among the books he wrote are "The Nature of Basketry," "The Art of
Paisley," "The New Basketry" and "Baskets as Textile Art."

LA Times