POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Soaring 18 feet high, seven sentinels made of weathered steel surround a female bronze figure that appears to emerge from the earth. This dynamic and awe-inducing public artwork, situated at the northwest perimeter of the campus, is Vassar College’s newest public art acquisition. The monumental sculpture, by Rose B. Simpson, a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, is nothing short of extraordinary and marks the first time a major outdoor work by an Indigenous artist has a permanent home on the campus. Simpson’s work, entitled Seed (2024), was acquired by The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Its location, within the College’s arboretum, along with the nearby Heartwood Hotel and soon-to-be-completed Dede Thompson Bartlett Center for Admission and Career Education, serves as a means to welcome visitors, students, and members of the community. Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director said, “The location of Seed along the College’s northwest border was selected so that it is visible from both the campus and surrounding neighborhoods. It symbolizes a community with its figurative elements looking both inward and outward.”

“The Loeb is delighted to present this powerful and thought-provoking new sculpture in the landscape of Vassar’s campus,” said Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator Mary-Kay Lombino. “Rose B. Simpson’s expressive design draws heavily on her ancestral Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh tribe’s traditions, while also integrating innovative techniques and materials to connect the past with contemporary experience, which we hope will resonate with all visitors to campus.” In Simpson’s own words, “The ancestral sentinels are ominous as they stand watch; they behold, they reflect a critical eye at the mannerisms modern humans take for granted, or even choose. The circle of protection provides an example of where values can adjust, and a critical seriousness of the weight of what we have taken for granted. The ancestors demonstrate to the future the work that is yet to be done.”

In Seed, the various geometric patterns and angular shapes that puncture the steel are forms Simpson attributes to her unconscious replication of the Pueblo visual language of her childhood. Cut from 10-by-4-foot steel sheets, the towering, androgynous figures each feature two bronze faces. High above the viewer, large, masked faces appear as watchful protectors, while smaller faces look inward at a central female figure emerging from the ground. Growing around the central figure is a variety of medicinal plants, including common milkweed, wild strawberry, and others that are native to the region—the ancestral lands of the Munsee-Lenape people. The plants were selected in consultation with Misty Cook, an herbalist from the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians whose ancestors were the earliest inhabitants of the Hudson Valley. A temporary Spotlight installation, For Maria: Rose B. Simpson and Pueblo Pottery, organized by Katherine Bernstein ’27 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, complements this new permanent outdoor work. This display brings together Simpson’s preliminary drawings for Seed, a pair of lithographs of her restored and painted ’85 El Camino titled Maria, and 20th-century, black-on-black pottery by Tewa artists Maria and Julian Martinez and runs through February 15, 2026.

Rose B. Simpson is a powerful voice in contemporary art who works in various media, including—but not limited to—sculpture, performance, and poetry. Her complex installations grapple with identity, culture, and the cycle of struggles on both a personal and global scale. Emerging from a centuries-long lineage of women from New Mexico working in blackware and redware pottery, Simpson comes from a family of artists and scientists who are concerned with sustainable living systems and in teaching each generation traditions that can sustain humankind for the future. One of the central themes addressed in Seed is the importance of women educating women and upholding traditions passed on from their elders. Simpson’s work also addresses themes such as the history of art, motherhood, Indigenous feminisms, respect for nature as a sacred entity, and Native American worldview and histories.

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) is an enrolled member of the Tewa-speaking Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh tribe that has inhabited what is now northern New Mexico for millennia. She received a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, an MFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MA in creative nonfiction writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work is owned by museums across the continent and exhibited internationally. She has had solo exhibitions at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, ICA Boston, Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, and Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. Museum collections include The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, ICA Boston, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Nevada Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum in Oregon, Princeton University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2023, she was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2024, Simpson was one of four inaugural recipients of the Ruth Award through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Her work was also included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Currently, there is a solo exhibition featuring new work by Simpson at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and an upcoming monumental bronze sculptural commission by Simpson will be unveiled at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in January 2026. The artist lives and works in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, where she was born and raised.

The purchase of Seed is generously supported by The Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson Fund, by exchange, while the installation is partially funded by the Smart Family Foundation of Illinois.