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Barbara Rosenthal Papers

 Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: SCA-0138

Scope and Contents

This collection documents Barbara Rosenthal’s personal and professional life, spanning from the early 1940s through 2025. It is comprised of materials related to her career as an artist, including her visual art and media art projects, photography, and video shorts, her artist’s books and writings, and professional activities related to her studio practice and business endeavors, as well as her career as an educator largely in higher education in New York. It also contains personal materials, including Rosenthal’s journals, family heirlooms, student papers, correspondence, and ephemeral objects and media Rosenthal accumulated and saved over the course of her life.

The collection is expansive and paints an intimate portrait of Rosenthal’s life and work from her early childhood in Long Island, New York, through her adulthood as a working artist in New York City and abroad. This collection provides insight into the artmaking process from inspiration through exhibition, review, and revision, and documents the relationship between Art and Artist. The archive has long been an essential component of Rosenthal’s studio at the Westbeth Artists Housing. In Rosenthal's own words, "Archives are the manifestations, in physical and media form, of the moment to moment reality of what an artist/writer/composer/creator encounters, which compress as coal and then to the diamonds of actual real art."

Materials in the collection are diverse in format and include textiles and clothing, audiovisual materials, objects and artifacts, ephemera, artist’s books, journals, photographs, scrapbooks, magazines, brochures, and newspapers; textual documents make up a relatively smaller portion of the collection.

Dates

  • 1940 - 2025

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

Appointments to examine materials must be made in advance. Please email QC.archives@qc.cuny.edu for more information or to schedule an appointment.

Conditions Governing Use

Reproductions may be provided to users to support research and scholarship. However, collection use is subject to all copyright laws. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Biographical / Historical

Barbara Rosenthal is an avant-garde interdisciplinary artist, writer, and performer. She explores existential themes through her multimedia artworks, which often take the form of photography, video, text, collage, and performance. Some of her major artistic projects include her Surreal and Conceptual Photography, video shorts, Provocation Cards, and her artist books and novel, Clues to Myself (1998), Homo Futurus (1986), Soul & Psyche (1998), and Wish for Amnesia (1986-). Rosenthal’s work has been exhibited around the world and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Library, and many of her artists books are available through Printed Matter.

In her own words, Rosenthal defines art as, “a vehicle of communication between the universe, the soul and psyche of the artist, and those of the viewer” (Rosenthal, Barbara, "Process vs. Product," White Hot Magazine, 2019). Almost all of her projects are produced through a process of accretion, as Rosenthal saves and repurposes scraps from her life and experiences, which she calls a “Life-Reality-Based Process.” In Cassandra Rijs’s 2013 profile on Rosenthal, she writes that Rosenthal “takes from her own life everything she encounters—physical objects, experiences, family members, clothing, medical data, landscapes, buildings, insects, animals, discarded papers, old rags, her dead father’s architectural supplies, her children’s toys, speech patterns, her own body, etc. Everything seems to be fair fame for her to draw upon, and through relentless reflection and introspection, coupled with her photography and drawings, plus puns and phrases by herself or from the fiction and cartoons she reads, turns into original, metaphysical, and sometimes absurdist art, revealing insights into what makes us human. Her material all comes from her own life, yet everyone else can relate to it.”

Rosenthal was born on August 17,1948 in the Bronx, New York, and moved with her parents, Leon Rosenthal and Evelyne (Freundlich) Rosenthal, to Franklin Square, New York at the age of two. She has one brother, Gilbert Rosenthal (1952-2011). Leon Rosenthal worked as an architect and served in the United States Army in World War II. Evelyne Rosenthal (1918-1984) worked as a secretary and was an avid craftsperson. The two married in New York in 1945. On February 19, 1972, Barbara Rosenthal married Terry Liss and was briefly known by her married name—Barbara Liss—before the pair divorced in 1976. In 1977, she began a long-term partnership with artist and filmmaker, Bill Creston, up until Creston’s death in 2024. The pair have two daughters together, Ola Rosenthal Creston, and Sena Clara Creston. Rosenthal, Creston and their daughters moved to the Westbeth Artists Housing complex in the West Village in New York City, where Rosenthal still lives and works today.

As a child, Rosenthal studied drawing and painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Art Students’ League, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She graduated from Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park, New York in 1966, and attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1966-1970, where she received her BFA in painting, and acted at the editor in chief of the school’s art and literary magazine, Patterns. In 1968, Rosenthal studied abroad at the Tyler School of Art in Rome. She studied education at Seattle Pacific College in 1973 and received her MFA in painting from Queens College in 1975.

Alongside her work as an artist, Rosenthal worked in photojournalism for publications including the New York Post, and Village Voice, and had a long career as an educator. In 1972-1975, Rosenthal taught at K-12 schools in Washington state. Between 1975 and 2013, Rosenthal taught English, art history, and photography at colleges and universities including Stephens College (Missouri), the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Purchase College, Nassau College, Queens College, and the College of Staten Island.

Extent

approx. 137.82 Linear Feet (Approximately 137.82 linear feet plus additional textiles and oversized items. 157 archival boxes; 6 artifact boxes; 5 book totes; 6 clothing items on garment rack; 4 oversize folders.)

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Abstract

Barbara Rosenthal is an avant-garde interdisciplinary artist, writer, and performer. She explores existential themes through her multimedia artworks, which often take the form of photography, video, text, collage, and performance. This collection documents Barbara Rosenthal’s personal and professional life, spanning from the early 1940s through 2025. It is comprised of materials related to her career as an artist, and professional activities related to her studio practice and business endeavors, as well as her career as an educator largely in higher education in New York. It also contains personal materials, including Rosenthal’s journals, family heirlooms, student papers, correspondence, and ephemeral objects and media Rosenthal accumulated and saved over the course of her life.

Arrangement

Records are arranged in seven series:

  • Visual Art and Media Projects
  • Artist’s Books and Bookwork Objects
  • Artist’s Records
  • Ephemera
  • Personal and Family Materials
  • Teaching Materials
  • Publications (Bibliography)

All series except for Publications are further arranged in subseries.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated by Barbara Rosenthal in 2021 with materials transfered to the archives in stages over several years through 2025.

Bibliography

The Process: Provocation Cards: Greg Stewart Interviews Barbara Rosenthal About Provocation Cards Project, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Greg Stewart, Ed. Noah Becker, 2022.

Process vs. Product, White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Barbara Rosenthal, Ed. Noah Becker, 2019.

Barbara Rosenthal: Hoarder of Life to Yield Art, a-n, Cassandra Rijs, 2013.

Processing Information

Barbara Rosenthal gave materials to the archives with handwritten box-level inventory lists. When relevant, inventory lists were saved and re-housed with the materials to preserve Rosenthal's notes and documentation.

Portions of the collection were processed by students in the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies class LBSCI 790.3: Advanced Archival Practicum during the Summer 2022 semester, instructed by Caitlin Waldron.

Accruals were processed by Olivia Zisman in Fall 2025- Spring 2026, and brought together with previous elements to form a cohesive whole. This was made possible by the Mellon Foundation, through the "Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory" grant awarded to the CUNY Office of Library Services.

Subjects

Collecting Areas

Related Names

Creator

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Title
Barbara Rosenthal Papers
Author
Olivia Zisman
Date
April 2026
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Physical Storage Information

Repository Details

Repository Details

Part of the Queens College (New York, N.Y.) Special Collections and Archives Repository

https://library.qc.cuny.edu/archives/
Contact:
Queens College Library, CUNY
Benjamin Rosenthal Library RO317
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing 11367 USA us

Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library | 65-30 Kissena Boulevard | Queens, NY 11367-1597 | Library Website

Finding Aids made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  Creative Commons License

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