Rosemary Elizabeth Gould

Rosemary Elizabeth Gould died peacefully in the early morning hours of June 3, 2026 at Grandvue Medical Care Facility in East Jordan, Michigan. Rosemary led an extraordinary life full of adventure and creativity, and while she struggled with many challenges and disappointments in her life, she always rose above them with dignity and grace.

Rosemary was born in Detroit on December 5, 1940 to Emory Enoch Weiss and Frances (Couillard) Weiss. She was the eldest of four siblings. Emory’s profession was as an autoworker, but his passion was his violin – and, along with Frances’ piano-playing, the home Rosemary grew up in was filled with the magic of music-making, nurturing her creativity from a young age. Rosemary’s creativity led her in a different direction from her parents, however – the visual arts. Her home (the family cottage on the Straits of Mackinac originally acquired and expanded on by her father) is filled with her artwork, dating from her childhood into her adulthood as a professional craftswoman and art professor.

After marrying James Gould in 1959 and having three children (Andrea Elizabeth, Miriam Barbara, and Christopher James), Rosemary re-invented herself not for the first time in her life by attending Wayne State University, eventually receiving a BA in Arts Education. Her children remember adventures during that time in downtown Detroit, exploring the Cass Corridor neighborhood, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and attending children’s arts classes at Your Heritage House while Rosemary worked in the studio facilities at Wayne State.

Still in Michigan, she taught primary school art in Port Huron area schools, where she and James moved to in the early 1970s. But Rosemary always had a drive to pursue her passion to become a professional artist. To that end, she eventually received her Masters of Fine Arts at Michigan State University, specializing in metalsmithing and fibers. After divorcing James, Rosemary remade her life in other places, teaching art as a university professor at various institutions, always taking in the unique cultural, geographic and ethnic influences of those places along the way, such as the Scandinavian and Hmong influences on the Minnesota prairie and the Mississippi River culture of Southeast Missouri. She eventually married a friend from her earlier days in Michigan on the shores of Lake Huron in front of the family cottage in Cheboygan, a place she always went back to. They lived in Marlborough, Connecticut; Rock Hall, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore; and then to Cumberland, in Western Maryland. During this time, Rosemary worked to develop her own jewelry-making business, called Metal Mosaics. While that business met with limited material success, it gave her an opportunity to perfect her skills in mokume gane (“married metals”) and other Japanese metalsmithing techniques, a skill she first developed as a student at Michigan State. Rosemary’s second marriage ended in divorce and she once again had to remake her life, this time as a graphic design professor (and eventually department chair) at LaRoche College, near Pittsburgh, where she developed a highly-regarded hands-on approach to the vocation of graphic communication, called “Design in Action.” Throughout her career, Rosemary was particularly passionate about attending summer programs at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, which is one of the institutions that holds her work in its permanent collection.

Rosemary eventually retired to her beloved family cottage on the Straits, and with limited resources further molded the dwelling with her own creative touch while continuing to pursue her craft, also working for a while as an adjunct professor at North Central Michigan College and part-time at the Mackinac State Historic Parks. That home stands today as a tribute to the continuity of her unique creative life and that of her family.

Rosemary enjoyed sailing - in her Port Huron days, she and James were active participants at the Port Huron Yacht Club with their Ranger 26 sailboat (named “Rosemary’s Baby”) and the weekend races held in conjunction with the Sarnia (Ontario) Yacht Club, as well as occasional longer races, including the annual Port Huron to Mackinac race. She also enjoyed traveling, including an extended time in London, England during her post-graduate studies and a year in Riga, Latvia as a Fulbright Scholar late in her career. Rosemary was a voracious reader, and her intellectual pursuits explored a wide variety of topics from light fiction to art and cultural history to the history of First Nations people, which had a considerable influence on much of her artwork and with whom she always felt a particular sense of solidarity. Her life always engaged fully with the world around her as a self-made woman. Even with the challenges, her life was carried out with great joy. Her son still remembers as a kid driving down the Edsel Ford Freeway with his mom in the driver’s seat blasting and singing along with various legendary women of soul on the radio.

Rosemary’s resiliency is demonstrated by the fact that even after her stroke in 2016 and the loss of her right side, she continued her artwork at a nursing home. One can get a sense of her humor by the fact that she once expressed a desire that upon death, her body should be placed on a burning raft and pushed out into the Straits of Mackinac. Instead of a Viking funeral, there will be a celebration of her life at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Petoskey, Michigan at a later day to be announced, likely late summer. She is preceded in death by her parents, her daughter Andrea Donovan, and her brother Peter. In addition to her children Miriam and Chris (Robert), she is survived by her brother John (Joan and children) and sister Barbara (Charlie and children), as well as her grandchildren Liz, Connor, and Nicolas.

A memorial service will be held on August 18, 2026 at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Petoskey, officiated by Reverend Kay M. Houck. There is also a temporary retrospective exhibit of Rosemary's work which will run until Thanksgiving 2026, on the second floor lobby of the Cheboygan Opera House, 403 N. Huron Street in Cheboygan, MI, during box office hours (Tuesday - Friday, Noon - 4pm). 

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Cheboygan Area Arts Council in memory of Rosemary Gould.