Marjorie Virginia Strider (January 26, 1931 – August 27, 2014) was an American painter, sculptor and performance artist best known for her three-dimensional paintings and site-specific
soft sculpture installations.
Biography
Born in 1931 in
Guthrie, Oklahoma,[1] Strider studied art at the
Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in the early 1960s. Strider's three-dimensional paintings of beach girls with "built out" curves were prominently featured in the
Pace Gallery's 1964 "International Girlie Show" alongside other "pin-up"-inspired
pop art by
Rosalyn Drexler,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Andy Warhol, and
Tom Wesselmann. Her comically pornographic Woman with Radish was made into the banner image for the show, one of the first successful exhibitions of the then-new gallery.[2] Her bold
figural work from this era aimed to subvert sexist images of women in popular culture by turning objectified female bodies into menacing forms that literally got "in your face." Strider had two subsequent solo exhibitions at the
Pace Gallery in 1965 and 1966 where she continued to show her voluminous paintings of bikini-clad girls as well as 3-D renderings of vegetables, fruits, flowers, clouds and other natural phenomena.[3]
Strider became a core member of the 1960s
avant-garde. She performed in
happenings organized by
Allan Kaprow,
Claes Oldenburg and others. In 1969 she organized with
Hannah Weiner and
John Perreault the first Street Work, an informal public art event. Twenty artists participated including
Vito Acconci, Gregory Battcock and
Arakawa. Strider's contribution was thirty empty picture frames which she hung in random locations in
Midtown Manhattan in the hopes of getting pedestrians to look at their environment differently.[4] Strider married Michael Kirby, a contemporary artist and writer who published the first book on happenings in 1965.
Around this time Strider made chocolate casts of Patty Oldenburg's breasts for
Claes's birthday (a plaster version was later acquired by
Sol LeWitt).[5] Perhaps it was her intimate friendship with the Oldenburgs that led Strider to redirect her artistic focus from hard sculptural paintings to
soft sculpture in the 1970s. She made site-specific installations of unbridled
polyurethane foam that tumbled out of windows (Building Work 1976,
PS1) or oozed down a spiral staircase (Blue Sky 1976,
Clocktower Gallery).[6] At times her renegade pours incorporated domestic objects (brooms, groceries, teapots), while others remained totally amorphous.[7] These works are similar in style and intent to
Lynda Benglis' floor paintings and
soft sculptures of the same era.[8]
From 1982 to 1985, a retrospective of her work toured museums and universities across the United States. Venues included:
SculptureCenter, New York;
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina;
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Museum of Art, University of Arizona, Tucson; and the
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. In the 1990s, she began to make paintings with tactile surfaces that were more
Abstract Expressionist than
Pop. In 2009 she revisited her original girlie theme, painting new examples which she exhibited at the Bridge Gallery, New York.
1964
Pace Gallery, New York, "First International Girlie Exhibit"
Selected bibliography
Alloway, Lawrence. Great Drawings of All Time: The Twentieth Century, Volume 2, New York: Shorewood/Talisman, 1981.
Battock, Gregory, ed. Super Realism: A Critical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1975
Dewey, Diane. "Marjorie Strider, Pioneering ’60s Artist Remains a Creative Force: Influential Postmodernist Continues to Speak through her Strong Contemporary Style," Artes Magazine, November 24, 2009
Hess, Thomas B. and Elizabeth C. Baker, eds. Art and Sexual Politics. New York: MacMillan
Hess and Linda Nochlin, eds. Woman as Sex Object. New York: Newsweek, Inc., 1972
Hunter, Sam. American Art of the 20th Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972
Johnston, Jill. Marmalade Me. New York: Dutton, 1971
Jones, V. W. Contemporary American Women Sculptors. Phoenix: Onyx Press, 1983
Kirby, Michael. The Art of Time. New York: Dutton, 1969
Lippard, Lucy. Pop Art. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966
Lippard. From the Center, feminist essays on women’s art. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1976
Lippard. Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object. New York: Praeger, 1973
Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors, A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991
Sachs, Sid and Kalliopi Minioudaki, eds. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968. Philadelphia, PA: University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 2010.
Semmel, Joan. A New Eros. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1977
Sewall-Ruskin, Yvonne. High On Rebellion. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1998
Yau, John. Marjorie Strider. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2011
^The original painting shows the woman with a bulbous radish between her parted, lipsticked lips, while the banner omitted the root in favor of an empty open mouth. See Sachs and Minioudaki (2010). See also John Canaday, "Art: From Clean Fun to Plain Smut. 'Girle Exhibit' Opens at Pace Gallery," The New York Times January 7, 1964, p. 31.
^K.L., "Marjorie Strider," ARTnews vol. 63 (January 1965), p. 11; E.C.B., "Marjorie Strider," ARTnews, vol. 64 (January 1966), pp. 16–17.
^"Artists, 'Doing Thing' Do Streets," New York Times, March 17, 1969, p. 44.
^See "Eight Artists Reply: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" ARTnews (January 1971), pp. 40–46. Marjorie Strider and Lynda Benglis are among the eight respondents; their work is illustrated together on p. 44.