Judith Roston Freilich
Judith Roston Freilich’s works on paper and textiles were inspired at a young age by a family that encouraged creativity and by the cycle of the seasons and living things. Their home was filled with passion for horticulture, fine fabrics, baking, and cooking. There was always something to learn and explore. These early passions are reflected in her work.
A Chicago native, Roston Freilich has been represented by Chicago galleries for forty-five years with solo shows. She has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown nationally. Her work has been selected for the Rockford Midwestern Biennial at the Rockford Art Museum, the Evanston and Vicinity Biennial at the Evanston Art Center, and the Bradley International Print and Drawing Show. Her work is in multiple permanent collections including the Library of Congress. She is currently a member of Dialogue Chicago’s artists’ discussions and Space 900, a cooperative gallery where she shows frequently.
Roston Freilich has always advocated integrating the arts into everyday life, bringing art into classrooms, and blending visual arts and music. She made music with her husband and four children and brought visual arts to Suzuki festivals. For many years, she organized volunteers for the New Trier Jazz Festival. Roston Freilich has led creativity workshops and taught visual arts at weekend retreats for high school students, helping them integrate their passion for visual arts into their lives.
Roston Freilich earned a BFA and merit-based scholarship award from Washington University in St. Louis. While working at Landfall Press as a printing assistant and curator, she earned a graduate degree in printmaking with Misch Kohn from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
My work begins from the moment I step inside myself and it reflects the moments that live within each of us, the aspects and histories of the cycle of life, of time, and of the journeys we all experience.
The history of the process is important in my art. There are always remnants visible from the path that each piece takes on the way to being resolved. As I work, moments are revealed in the lives of imaginary organic images that live in enigmatic time and space. These spontaneous, intuitive organisms have unique characteristics and journeys all collected from life's experiences.
The drawings and the textiles invite us to step inside the complicated journey within each of us. They reveal both the devastating parts of life and the overwhelmingly beautiful parts. The marks, stitches, and materials in the work reflect our complex rhythms, incongruities, and relationships. There are bursts of energy —fierce, uncontrolled, uninhibited urgencies — and beautiful swells of serenely floating calm and deep searches. In some work, the process seems unfinished, leaving traces of past joumeys and exploration for the future.
— Judith Roston Freilich
Life is a process of constant change wherein all living things are subject to age, decay and death; because previous life forms provide the basis of physical nourishment and evolution for all that is new, regeneration and bloom coexist alongside senescence and degeneration. This cyclical, existential and holistic process has long been a major theme of the arts and religion.
As the past gets obliterated from memory and buried under earth's dust, archeologists, scientists, historians and artists work to excavate, discover and interpret that which was forgotten.
— Bruce Thorne, Bruce,Chicago based visual artist and art critic, 2018 Judith Roston Freilich, Release, page 1, 2018
