Rolanda, Rosa, 1895-1970

Rosa Rolanda was an American multidisciplinary artist, dancer, and choreographer.

She was born in Azusa, California on September 6, 1895. Her father, Henry Charles Cowan, was an engineer and her mother, Guadalupe Ruelas, was of Mexican descent. Rolanda began her artistic career in New York in 1916 as a celebrated dancer in vaudeville and Broadway revues. She became involved with the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias in 1924, and in the following year the couple traveled to Mexico, where Rolanda began to take photographs. Albums of her images were published in Covarrubias's best-selling books, Island of Bali (1937) and Mexico South: Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946). Her work was also featured in the "Ameridinian" issue of Wolfgang Paalen's journal, DYN, published in 1943.

During the late 1920s or early 1930s, Rolanda experimented with photograms, creating a series of surrealist self-portraits that may have been influenced by Man Ray, who photographed Rolanda in Paris in 1923. She probably began to paint around 1926, but began to use this medium more frequently from the mid-1930s on. The majority of her canvases depict colorful scenes of children and festivals, portraits of friends (such as the movie actresses Dolores del Río and María Félix), and self-portraits. Rolanda and Covarrubias married in 1930, and by 1935 they had permanently settled into his family home in Tizapan El Alto, close to Mexico City. In 1952 Rolanda exhibited her paintings in a solo show at the Galeria Souza in Mexico City.

By 1952, Miguel Covarrubias had left Rolanda for a relationship with a promising dancer, Rocío Sagaón, who Rolanda had helped to train. Some of Rolanda's works from this period, such as Autorretrato (self-portrait), seem to convey some of the inner turmoils she suffered as a result of this betrayal by her husband.

She died in Mexico City, Mexico on March 25, 1970.