CHANGING LABELS: FOR ROSSOW, ART IS AVENUE TO AWARENESS

As if the pandemic wasn’t enough, the surrealism of what it has both revealed and exposed about this American life has everyone, artists especially, looking at their day-to-day activities a bit differently.

Roy St. Christopher Rossow is a Jamaican-born artist. He was placed into foster care by his mother at an early age because he contracted poliomyelitis as a child due to the lack of preventive intervention during the last polio outbreak on the island.

Rossow was sent to, and grew up in, Ellington, Connecticut, with his foster family who later adopted him. I spoke with him during a break from the commissioned work that had been keeping him focused and busy. He said that commission or exhibit deadlines keep him motivated because missing them would be embarrassing. His life was already regimented before the pandemic…