Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour. Rolston's career spans the areas of photography, film, creative direction, experiential design (including hospitality development), branding, product design, fine art, publishing and arts education.

Photography career

Born in Los Angeles, Rolston studied painting and drawing at the Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, and in the Bay Area at the San Francisco Art Institute. He also studied drawing, photography and imaging, and filmmaking at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. There, in 2006, he received an honorary doctorate. While still a student at ArtCenter, Rolston received an assignment from American artist Andy Warhol, for Warhol's celebrity focused Interview magazine, which served as his "discovery". Thereafter, he began a successful career in photography. Rolston began shooting covers and editorial assignments for founding editor Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, as well as for other publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, W and The New York Times Magazine. Rolston has completed thousands of photoshoots in his career, including over 100 covers for Rolling Stone. Rolston's images have been exhibited at institutions and museums in solo and group shows including Beauty CULTure (with Lauren Greenfield, Herb Ritts, Andres Serrano, and Carrie Mae Weems, 2011), The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, California; The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion (curated by Mark Francis and Margery King), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1997); and Fashion and Surrealism, FIT Gallery, New York, 1987 (traveled to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, 1988). A series of monographs have been published of Rolston's works including Big Pictures, A Book of Photographs (1991), a selection of images from the artist's first decade as a photographer, with an introduction by American film director Tim Burton. It was published by Bulfinch Press, New York. beautyLIGHT, Pictures at a Magazine (2008), is a survey of more than twenty years of Rolston's editorial portraits. It was published by teNeues, Germany. Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits (2012), is a fine art series consisting of large color portraits of ventriloquist dummies held in a rare museum collection. It was published by Pointed Leaf Press, New York. Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles (2017), is a retrospective capturing the artist’s work in mid-career. It was published by teNeues, Germany. In 2021, Laguna Art Museum published Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, an exhibition catalog. Twenty selections of Rolston’s work were gifted to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2024. The acquisition was led by Getty Curator of Photographs Paul Martineau. The selection highlights images from Rolston's Hollywood Royale retrospective. Rolston's works are in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Portrait Gallery (Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture at The Smithsonian, Washington D.C.).

Film career

Rolston has also conceived, written and directed numerous film projects, having overseen over 100 music videos and 200 television commercials in his career, including collaborations with artists as diverse as Madonna, Janet Jackson, Beyoncé Knowles, and Miley Cyrus, as well as numerous advertising campaigns – both print and television – for clients such as L'Oreal, Revlon, Estée Lauder, Clairol, Levi's, Pantene, Elizabeth Arden, Gap and Polo Ralph Lauren, among others. Rolston established a documentary production unit called ‘R-ROLL’, a verbal play on industry reference to ‘B-roll’, that is – the capturing of behind-the-scenes footage. The ‘R’ is for Rolston. Added Rolston: “there's an overwhelming demand for filmed content, as clients expand their reach beyond traditional media." R-ROLL has produced projects for Time, Inc., Amazon.com, ESPN, A&E/Lifetime Networks, SBE Entertainment Group and Virgin Hotels among others. Said Rolston, "We're now entering an era where the ‘making of' is just as important as the ‘of'. And clients seem to enjoy the integration of our media services. Print, film, design, documentary, you might say we're a ‘one-stop-shop'." Rolston has appeared as a guest expert on a spectrum of beauty-oriented broadcast programs, from Bravo's Shear Genius and Make Me a Supermodel to the CW's America's Next Top Model.

Creative direction

Rolston diversified into creative direction and branding, developing projects in experiential design, including hospitality projects and product design. Hospitality clients have included Mahmood Khimji's Highgate Holdings, Sam Nazarian's SBE Entertainment Group, Richard Branson's Virgin Hotels and Barry Sternlicht's SH Hotels & Resorts. With a 2024 project, The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel, Rolston expanded his creative direction practice into the museum world. Serving as the creative director for multiplatinum recording artist Jewel, he oversaw the creation of a life-size hologram for the artist's collaboration with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. This hologram, positioned in the atrium lobby of the museum, acted as the centerpiece of an immersive installation, greeting visitors to the site.

Fine art

Rolston has created four photographic fine art projects that have led to a series of publications and exhibitions: Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits consists of monumentally scaled color portraits of ventriloquial figures housed in the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. This was Rolston's first self-assigned photographic series and debuted at Diane Rosenstein Fine Art in Los Angeles. It has since travelled to venues in Miami and Berlin, among others. Rolston's third published monograph accompanied the exhibition. Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles – which includes Rolston's fourth monograph, as well as a travelling exhibition – is a retrospective of his editorial portraits from 1977 to 1993. Edited by long-time Los Angeles–based gallerist and curator David Fahey, this series presents an array of portraits that capture the 1980s and its myriad talents. From Michael Jackson and Madonna, to Prince, George Michael and Cyndi Lauper, the selection of images reflects the era. Art People: The Pageant Portraits is a series of emotionally-intimate portraits of participants in “Pageant of the Masters", a tableaux vivants entertainment that is part of an annual arts festival held in Laguna Beach, California. The project features dramatically scaled color prints; one installation alone is over thirty feet wide. Ralph Pucci International first exhibited this series in its Los Angeles gallery in 2017, and this work became Rolston's first solo institutional exhibition on the West Coast when it opened Summer 2021 at Laguna Art Museum. Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, as yet unpublished, is another dramatically scaled color portrait series, this depicting Christian mummies housed in the Capuchin Catacombs of Sicily. The project is, according to Rolston "a meditation on mortality"; it represents the artist's continuing evolution as a photographer and is an attempt to elevate his portraiture to a conceptual level. Rolston’s fine art photography has been featured at galleries including CAMERA WORK, Berlin, DE; Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Ralph Pucci International, Los Angeles, CA. Rolston has stated his purpose with art-making is to "pose questions about the things that make us most human."

Arts education and scholarships

In 1998, Rolston established the Matthew Rolston Scholarship for Film and Creative Direction at ArtCenter College of Design. Said Rolston, "the scholarship is intended to promote cross-disciplinary studies between film and other creative practices". In 2015 Rolston became an adjunct professor and curricular advisor to ArtCenter College's Undergraduate and Graduate Film Departments and continues to lecture and mentor there in the fields of marketing and communications strategy, fashion communications, luxury branding and public service messaging. At ArtCenter, Rolston teaches two original courses which he conceived of and wrote. The first, centering on marketing communications, is called The Power of Pleasure. And the second class, named Conscious Communication, centers on messaging in the public interest. Rolston's classes are situated within ArtCenter's film program, however they invite members from diverse disciplines including advertising and creative direction, photography and imaging, fine art, and other courses of study offered at the college. Within the structure of the classes, students create short form films in an atmosphere similar to that of a professional communications agency with Rolston acting as instructor, mentor and creative director and the students enacting the roles of individual writer/director ‘makers’. An illustrated textbook of Rolston's The Power of Pleasure, based on his original syllabus and lectures, is currently under development. Recognizing Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles as another significant Southern California institution that shaped Rolston’s early artistic development, he established the "Matthew Rolston Scholarship Fund for Product and Fashion Design at Otis College." This fund is devoted to supporting students in product and fashion design, with an emphasis on communication and creative direction skills. In 2024, Rolston took on the role of senior lecturer at Otis College, directing his attention to object design and development. He collaborated with Jonathan Fidler, Otis’ assistant chair of product design, to create a course entitled Vessel of Dreams: The Packaging of Perfumery, which explores the potential for communications inherent in luxury fragrance packaging.

Books

Honors and awards