The Spirits of the Grand Canyon series had its first showing at the College of Letters and Science, Honours Commons at UCLA in March 1986. Consisting of 25 oil and acrylic paintings the result of three years’ work, the series originated from a suggestion by William McCann the then director of the California Museum of Science and Industry, as he and Rosen were flying over the Grand Canyon, that Rosen ‘do an American theme’. Aroused by the dramatic geological topography of the Canyon, Rosen sensed that this wonder of nature must be filled with spirits and denizens. The paintings became a vivid, dramatic and highly colourful recreation of the historical and spiritual life of the Canyon, staged against one of the world’s most staggering natural wonders.

Speculating about the phenomenon led him back to the Hopis and the manifestation through the Kachina Dolls, of their mythology as expressed by warriors, clowns, guards and other ancestral deities.