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Rosler’s collages were featured prominently in Goodbye to all that!, a San Diego feminist publication that started out of frustration with the culture of the male-dominated underground press and its content, which often featured sex and pornography and disregarded important issues affecting women. In fact, Rosler felt quite passionately that she shouldn’t profit from such displays of trauma, but instead use them to disrupt and defy - a goal shared by the underground newspapers where she displayed this work. Though Rosler was a trained artist and active in the high arts scene, these works were not displayed on gallery walls, but in the pages of underground publications (publications independently produced outside of the mainstream press) and passed out as flyers at protests. The living room that was and remains a symbol of American domesticity and comfort is now marred by the realities of war. Just outside the vast windows appear GIs in a war zone. Her collage Vacation Getaway, for instance,features a photograph of an upscale living room, but the serenity is interrupted by Rosler’s intervention. By placing these images within glossy pictures from interior decorating magazines, she created an uncomfortable paradox, agitating viewers and forcing them to see and feel the crisis at hand. In the series of approximately twenty collages, Rosler took advantage of the cache of images taken by photojournalists in Vietnam.

With House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, the series of photomontages that she began in 1967, she sought to disrupt the calm veneer of the home with the very real events that were taking place abroad. All too often, she felt, people were desensitized to horrific imagery by the sheer volume of what was filtering into their homes from the so-called first televised war. As the world around her was changing, however, she cast aside this practice in favor of one as important as it was transgressive. Rosler began her career as an abstract painter. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Martha Rosler, “Red Stripe Kitchen,” from the series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home,” c.