Rosa JH Berland: Curator, Writer, and Champion of Contemporary Painting
Rosa JH Berland is an accomplished curator and writer whose practice is deeply engaged with contemporary painting and its profound capacity to negotiate themes of identity, politics, and imagination. Her curatorial and critical approach is rooted in careful, sustained looking and a sharp interest in how artists construct private, often speculative worlds in response to lived experience.
For Aleph Contemporary, Berland curated the significant exhibition The Road to Utopia (2020), which brought together works by Alex McAdoo, Lee Johnson, and Jaime Valtierra. The exhibition explored the multifaceted role of painting as both a form of critique and a place of refuge: a space where personal history, socio-political pressures, and art-historical references are actively reworked into new, subjective realities. Berland’s framing of the show allowed the artists’ distinct visual languages to sit in dynamic dialogue, unified by a shared concern with storytelling, transformation, and the search for meaning beyond fixed ideals.
Her work, particularly her contribution to Aleph Contemporary, reflects a fundamental belief in painting as an active, questioning process—not a final destination, but rather a vital means of thinking through the world as it currently exists and as it might be powerfully imagined.