Roseline Young

Artist:  Roseline Young

Genre: Fiber

Her Art:

A fiber artist, Roseline Young utilizes weaving, quilting, spinning and fabric manipulation to create artworks and installations for both indoor settings and outdoor venues. Her medium includes cotton, wool, linen, mohair and raw, unspun fleece, some of which she obtains from friends who raise sheep and grow their own cotton.

“I love texture, things that come out, exploding from structured pieces,” comments Young.

She creates this effect in a number of ways. For some works, Young uses a spinning wheel to combine different colors of yarn. For other works, she spins several pieces together by hand until they twist back on themselves “often leaving edges and ends spilling out of the tapestry and inviting the viewer back inside,” in the words of Naples Botanical Gardens.

Outdoor Public Artworks and Installations

A self-avowed social activist, Young believes “art has the power to motivate action.” Toward that end, Young creates tapestries, installations and community weavings for display in public spaces. Many of these artworks and installations express environmental concerns relating to water quality and climate change.

“I am livid about the mistreatment of our earth and water,” Young asserts. “I am passionate about using my artistic voice to call attention to better stewardship of our environment by creating community art projects.” Among these are her Fish Talk installations at the Alliance for the Arts, Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, Mound House and Broadway Palm, and Turf Wars – Art Speaks for the Earth, a 2018 and 2019 collaboration by Young with Marci Mills, Paulette Karlin, the Weavers of Char-Lee, Common Threads, Art Quilters Unlimited and Art Lunch Bunch. The latter project produced a 72-foot-long aggregation of 200 circular rings designed to draw attention to the deleterious effect that cyano-bacteria is having on the Caloosahatchee River. Expressing the imperative that agricultural interests in the Kissimmee River valley and surrounding Lake Okeechobee need to stop dumping nitrogen, phosphorous and waste in our waters, the installation traveled to the Langford Kingston Home, Alliance for the Arts and Visual Art Center in Punta Gorda after first being displayed above the entablature of the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center.

Similarly, Hands Across the Sands brought hundreds of people together to paint banners demanding action to save our coast from pollution. With Currents, a fence project that started at ArtFest, continued to the S.T.A.R.S. Complex football field and terminated in Clemente Park, Young and her cohorts focused on recycling and protecting our waters. That was also the message conveyed by Leviathan, a huge underwater sculpture made of recycled materials that Young and Marci Mills teamed up to create for the Punta Gorda CHNEP nature festival, during which teens were invited to add plastic bottles, ribbons and other recyclables.

“Also notable is my 8’ x 24’ wall installation at the New Orleans International Airport and the weaving in the Smithsonian, created for the Bush White House,” Young adds.

As a live-aboard, master-captain from New Orleans, Rose has strong connections with sailors and the sea. Her Weeping Water (seventh photo) expresses her love of water and how her heart breaks because pollution is out of control.

“Water weeps for the lack of stewardship and preservation.”

Bleached Coral (eighth photo) displays her worries over the worldwide loss of reefs providing food, income, recreation and protection from storms, and Gone with the Wind (tenth photo) reminds us how delicate our world is, knowing it can blow away with climate change and global warming.

In her ongoing effort to use art to open eyes and make people aware and motivated to seek positive change, Young has worked with the Lee County Black History Society, Keep Lee County Beautiful, Lee County Arts Center, Lee County Parks & Rec and Art Fest Fort Myers, successfully completing art projects with the community asking for better stewardship of our environment.

“I continue studying art, political impacts on our Florida environment and ways to combat ignorance and apathy through art,” Young adds. “I network different groups and find common goals to make our community more aware of our environmental and social problems.”

Bio

Young has received several arts & culture grants which have supported her efforts to foster the arts in Fort Myers and Lee County. She has exhibited work at the City of Fort Myers 2022 Biennial Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, the COVID-delayed 2020 Biennial Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Langford-Kingston Home (November, 2021) and 2017 Fort Myers Individual Artist Grant Recipient Show at the Davis Art Center (that was shortened by Hurricane Irma).

A retired Art teacher with more than thirty years of experience, Rose offers classes locally at the Alliance for the Arts, Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, public libraries and her own Rose Line Weaving Studio that are intended to instill creative problem-solving and play in her students. “What I love about weaving is that you’re playing all the time,” Rose adds. “You ask, ‘Will this work?’ Then try and see.”

Young holds a Master’s Degree from Tulane University in New Orleans.

October 25, 2021.