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Arts & Entertainment

Artist and Model Collaborate on New Museum Exhibit

The exhibit, entitled Mostly Rosemary, explores ethnic identity.

Upstairs at the is a new exhibit of four paintings, one each of three women and one man, all of who represent a different ethnicity.

But there's a catch. All four paintings are of the same person.

The exhibit, entitled Mostly Rosemary, opened Sunday and shows the work of Hoboken based painter Laura Alexander. An award-winning artist who has shown her work in New York and abroad, Alexander also earned a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2006.

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Alexander, who has worked out of her studio in the Monroe Center since 1991, said she spent two years on the project. First she took several photographs of a model named Rosemary Gonzalez, who with the use of different makeup, wigs, outfits and facial expressions posed in ways meant to represent various ethnic identities.

In turn Gonzalez appears as a Muslim woman, an Orthodox Jewish man, an African American woman and a Caucasian woman with blonde hair and large sunglasses reminiscent of noted socialite Paris Hilton.

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“It was fabulous the way she would turn her head and her whole countenance would change,” Alexander said of Gonzalez.

Alexander then reproduced six of the photographs as oil paintings on 50-inch canvas squares. Four of the six images are in the exhibit.

Alexander said she was inspired to begin the project by the election of President Barack Obama and the questions that some have raised about his ethnic, national and religious background.

“It was a good thing, but it also shook loose buried sentiments that people have,” Alexander said. “I want to bring these issues to the forefront so we can talk about them.”

Mostly Rosemary, on display on the museum's second floor, also includes a documentary about Alexander's work on the project. Alexander said her next big project involves a series of self-portraits.

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