My work explores ecofeminism, diaspora, memory, identity, food culture, and migration through materials that hold deep personal meaning. As an immigrant whose family has navigated multiple migrations, I understand the constant reshaping of identity, the need to shed old skins, and the strength required to adapt. I work with silicone as second skin, hair as biological cable to our thoughts, water as carrier and purifier, language and recipes as fluids requiring living vessels.

Throughout my 40 years of studio work, I've traced the threads that connect us, investigating human relations and identity by rearranging hair on skin surfaces, exploring shadow and transformation by subverting Medusa's myth, and examining our role in polluting water and our capacity to purify it. These investigations have deepened my understanding of what happens when diaspora severs our natural connections. When we're separated from ritual community, we must purify ourselves. When thought-cables are cut, we turn to technology. When languages drown, we become the living vessels that carry them forward.

Currently, I am working on Let Me Tell You Something, a book preserving my grandmother's Eastern European recipes and Yiddish (an endangered language that traveled from Romania to Peru before World War II). Parallel to this, I'm creating a series about reciprocity with water: how we meditate on it, how we care for it, as retribution for all the nourishing and healing it provides. Working across drawing, printmaking, photography, and material intervention, I build each piece through layers by adding and subtracting material in a process that mirrors how identity itself is constructed. I add three-dimensional elements to surfaces because I want direct interaction with the viewer: the tactile material, the artist, extending a hand to you, the beholder. In that space, we create connection and dialogue.

Rosemarie Gleiser Blufstein

Fulbright Fellow, Ph.D.

Born in Peru, practiced across Colombia, Spain, and the United States.