Locke's essay published in Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer

Striped green and purple oil on linen
Warren Rohrer, Fields- Amish I, 1974, oil on linen, 60¼ x 60¼ inches, Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley. Gift of Dr. Charles McCrae, 1977 (1977.37).
Nancy Locke’s essay (coauthored with Christopher Campbell), “Work, Labor, Matter: Warren Rohrer’s Abstraction,” appears in Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson. Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, this major loan exhibition examines the art of Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) as it evolved in conversation with poet Jane Turner Rohrer (b. 1928), his partner of nearly fifty years. The dialogues Field Language traces flow between husband and wife, painting and poetry, and between tradition and modernism. Both Rohrers left the rural lifeways of a Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world.”