BARBARA ROSENTHAL is a Conceptual Artist whose major contribution is to have brought content, through the subconscious, to Conceptualism. Whether a work has been physically produced, or exists only as words describing itself, its birth is the direct expression of psychological and metaphysical angst, giving form to existential duress in a symbolic "attempt to come to grips with unbearable realities," as John Russell wrote in The New York Times, of her representation in "Time and Memory: Video Art and Identity,” at The Jewish Museum, in NYC, 1988.

“An authority born of constant introspection characterizes her photographic meditations … and … [she] embraces chaos and uncertainty with a persistent grip upon the messy ephemerality of experience…. She ceaselessly shapes and reshapes what may finally be understood as her approaches to a Platonic ideal that lies behind the shifting forms and possibilities of her repeated motifs and variations upon themes…. She renders personal adventure on a large and public scale in projects … which transgress the conventional limits of her own (and others’) privacy,” wrote Ellen Handy in Photography Quarterly, about Rosenthal's work in the 1995 exhibition, "Time, Memory, and the Limits of Photography," at the Center For Photography in Woodstock, NY.

“All my work is but a reflection of my total cosmology,” she quotes Salvador Dali, and creates from a state of trance leading to what Isaac Asimov calls “The Eureka Phenomenon,” a method which allies her work with Dada and Surrealism rather than from the cerebral state of mind that illustrates or promotes pre-developed ideas, a methodology which distinguishes her from fellow contemporary Conceptualists. And working during a generation steeped in overt political reference, she has maintained (in what might be considered her only political remark), in a quote from Ionesco in her 1992 Hanging Paper Hallway Installation at the Elston Gallery in NYC: "Let us be on guard against the lie that what is political is also spiritual."

Mixed at times with text from literature or science or the journals she has kept since age eleven, her images represent a cosmological nexus, a universality of sensitive human experience which evokes connection in the viewer. Her iconography, often in long views, and occasionally combined, includes birds and feathers; primates; horses; dogs; fish; trees; water; sky; circuses; twins; hands, feet, and faces of herself and family members; and broken or worn out personal articles such as shattered dishes, old clothing, toys, shoes, and photographs or torn pages from resonant printed books.

Small editions of usually black and white photographic or text-based paper wall works, video, performance (documentation), installation and language- or media-poetry, sometimes in the form of button pins, are often playful and irreverent, and utilize materials ranging from fragments of scrap paper, cloth, newspaper, xeroxes, and three dimensional objects, to large fine archival photographic paper, or offset reproduction. And, as she stated in a panel discussion with Ellen Handy about art-making at The Gallery Of Contemporary Art in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1991, many dictums guide her production: that pattern replace color; that as few materials are used as possible; that as little space is used as possible; that there are no embellishment or superfluous element of design; that a work be visible and present new elements at every distance; that a work engage a viewer differently from separate vantages; that a viewer be left room to freely associate; that it reach several centers of the psyche simultaneously; that mystery always be present; that it does not advocate; that it does not repeat or copy past successes; that it can maintain its veracity in an imaginary room of great works; that it be available to everyone and both produced and priced at lowest possible cost.

At age 15, when she was told seriously by the psychologist of her high school that "if you start making art now, and never stop, and work at it, you can probably stay out of mental institutions," she began her career as a Painting and Drawing student of Isaac Soyer at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, moving on to the Art Students' League in 1964-66, and, having read about the Happenings of Allan Kaprow, staged her own in the basement of her parents' small house just over the city line in Nassau County. She received a B.F.A. in Painting from Carnegie-Mellon University, where she edited "Patterns," the literary-art magazine as a Sophomore and a Senior, spending her Junior year in Rome with Tyler School of Art. At Carnegie, mentors such as Elaine deKooning and Gandy Brodie encouraged her to make art that was "personal." In 1973, she received an M.F.A. in Painting from Queens College/City University of New York, studying with Louis Finkelstein, and upon receiving this degree, at the age of 26, began an unbroken series of part-time, visiting, or sabbatical replacement college teaching positions at schools including Parsons School of Design, The School of Visual Arts, The New School, Stephens College, Jersey City State College, Nassau College, Tisch School of Art/NYU, Cornell University, and CUNY/The College of Staten Island, where she has been teaching Writing since 1996.

Her art dealers have included Carlo Lamagna, Dooley LeCappellaine, and Monique Goldstrom, and her work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art. She lives and maintains a studio in Westbeth, a federally subsidized artists' housing project in the West Village of Manhattan, along the Hudson River. The cemetery plot she purchased in 1984 for future use is located near her mother and grandmother in an overgrown section of Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York.