Marjorie Strider
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Key Information

Visual Works
image icon Girl with open mouth.[3] 1963 © Michael Chutko
image icon Come Hither,[4] 1963, acrylic on epoxy-coated Styrofoam mounted on masonite and wood panel, 63 inches by 42 inches by 9 inches
image icon Green Triptych[5] (1963), three painted bikini-clad women with three-dimensional breasts and buttocks

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

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Born in 1931 in Guthrie, Oklahoma,[6] 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"[7] alongside other "pin-up"-inspired pop art by Rosalyn Drexler (the only other female[1]), Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Ben Johnson, and Tom Wesselmann. Her comically pornographic Girl with Radish was made into the banner image for the show, one of the first successful exhibitions of the then-new gallery.[8][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[9] 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.[10]

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 (a wordplay on earthwork), 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.[11] Strider married Michael Kirby, a contemporary artist and writer, who published Michael Kirby: Happenings; Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman; An Illustrated Anthology written and edited by Michael Kirby (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.), in 1965.[12][13][14] and later became a professor of theater and performance at New York University.[6]

On the 23rd and 24th of March, 1971, Marjorie Strider presented Cherry Smash at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.[15]

Around this time, for Claes Oldenburg's birthday, Strider made chocolate casts of Patty Mucha Oldenburg's breasts (a plaster version was later acquired by Sol LeWitt).[16] 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).[17] At times her renegade pours incorporated domestic objects (brooms, groceries, teapots), while others remained totally amorphous.[18] These works are similar in style and intent to Lynda Benglis' floor paintings and soft sculptures of the same era.[19]

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.[citation needed]

Marjorie Strider died at her home in Saugerties, New York, on August 27, 2014.[20]

Works

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  • Strider, Marjorie (1982). Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970-1980, Selected Works. Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University.

Public collections

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Selected exhibitions

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  • 2011 Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, "Marjorie Strider" [solo exhibition] (catalogue)
  • 2010 University of the Arts, Philadelphia, "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968" [traveling exhibition] (catalogue)
  • 1999 Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase (catalogue)
  • 1995 Andre Zarre Gallery, New York, "Recent Paintings”
  • 1988–90 Finn Square, New York, "Sunflower Plaza," outdoor installation
  • 1984 Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, "Wall Sculpture and Drawings”
  • 1982 Myers Fine Art Gallery, SUNY Plattsburgh, "Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970–1980" [traveling exhibition through 1985] (catalogue)
  • 1976 The Clocktower, New York
  • 1976 PS1, New York
  • 1974 Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, "Strider: Sculpture and Drawings 1972–1974" (brochure)
  • 1966 Pace Gallery, New York
  • 1965 Pace Gallery, New York
  • 1964 Pace Gallery, New York, "First International Girlie Exhibit"

Selected sources

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  • 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
  • Lippard. The Pink Glass Swan, 1995.
  • Pincus-Witten, Robert. Postminimalism. New York: Out of London Press, 1977
  • 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

References

[edit]
[edit]
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Marjorie Strider

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Marjorie Strider (1931–2014) was an American painter, sculptor, and performance artist known for her pioneering three-dimensional "build-out" works in Pop art, which extended sculptural elements from the canvas to create confrontational, satirical commentary on consumer culture, gender representation, and pin-up imagery. [1] Active primarily in New York, she emerged in the 1960s as one of the few women artists engaging with Pop art, exhibiting alongside figures such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. [2] Her early signature style featured aggressive relief elements that protruded from paintings, often drawing on erotic pin-up motifs but subverting them through grotesque exaggeration and ironic humor—such as bikini-clad figures with breasts extending outward or closely cropped faces with oversized lips. [1] A notable example from this period is Girl with Radish (1963), which used abstracted pin-up imagery and a protruding radish to poke fun at the erotic conventions prevalent in male-dominated Pop art. [2] Strider participated in landmark group shows, including The First International Girlie Show at Pace Gallery, where her contributions highlighted her role in critiquing the movement's objectification of women. [2] In the 1970s, her practice shifted toward more overtly grotesque and conceptual works, incorporating bulbous vegetable forms, oozing substances, and site-specific soft sculptures that continued to defy viewer expectations and challenge artistic conventions. [1] Over her five-decade career, Strider's innovative blending of painting and sculpture earned her recognition as an essential, if long-underrepresented, figure in Pop art history, with her pieces now held in numerous museum collections. [3] Her legacy has gained renewed attention through posthumous exhibitions and reevaluations emphasizing her influence on expanding the Pop narrative to include feminist and avant-garde perspectives. [1]

Early life

Family and education

Marjorie Virginia Strider was born on January 26, 1931, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the second of five children.[4] Her father worked as a cement contractor, while her mother was a secretary at an Air Force base near Oklahoma City and led local campaigns to improve literacy.[4] Strider attended the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri and Oklahoma State University.[4] She gained early professional experience designing shoe-store window displays before relocating to New York in 1957.[4]

Career

New York Pop Art scene

Marjorie Strider moved to New York in 1957 after studying at the Kansas City Art Institute, quickly integrating into the city's vibrant avant-garde scene. [5] [6] She became part of the first wave of New York Pop artists in the early 1960s, contributing to the movement's exploration of popular imagery and commercial aesthetics alongside contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann. [4] Her early recognition in the Pop Art community came through group exhibitions, most notably her inclusion in “The First International Girlie Show” at Pace Gallery in 1964, a landmark exhibition that highlighted pin-up and glamour imagery in contemporary art. [7] [8] This participation established her presence among leading Pop figures and led to solo exhibitions at Pace Gallery in 1965 and 1966, where her work received dedicated presentations. [9] [8] Strider's initial dissatisfaction with the constraints of flat painting prompted her to begin early experiments with three-dimensional additions to her canvases, an approach that distinguished her emerging practice within the New York Pop Art scene. [8] [10]

Three-dimensional paintings

In the early 1960s, Marjorie Strider developed her signature three-dimensional paintings by adding protruding "build-outs" to her canvases, using materials such as cardboard, wood, laminated pine, and Masonite to push sculptural elements into the viewer's space.[4][11] She described herself as fundamentally a sculptor interested in perception and space, explaining that she grew dissatisfied with the flat plane of the canvas and began building out into the room.[12] This technique created hybrid works that deliberately occupied the ambiguous zone between painting and sculpture, challenging the boundaries of flat representation.[11] Strider's early experiments in this mode focused on plants and vegetables, such as radishes and tomatoes, rendered with protruding forms that appeared to emerge aggressively or menacingly from the surface.[11] She soon shifted to depictions of bikini-clad women, applying build-outs to breasts and buttocks to make them project realistically from the picture plane, often in bright triptych formats that exaggerated pin-up imagery drawn from glossy advertisements and men's magazines.[4][13] These works were created as a satire of men's magazines, using humor, exaggeration, and three-dimensional intrusion to parody objectification and challenge the passive male gaze.[4] Prominent examples from 1963 include Girl with Radish, an acrylic and laminated pine on Masonite panel measuring 72 x 60 inches, featuring a blue-eyed woman in suggestive eye contact with the viewer, her lips and eyelashes extending sculpturally outward while a cherry-red radish is clamped between her teeth in a playful yet ironic commentary on erotic Pop Art motifs.[2] Green Triptych presents a bikini-clad woman twirling across three panels, her bosom and bottom prominently built out in laminated pine to disrupt the flat plane.[11] Come Hither depicts a green-eyed woman in a flirtatious pose, with carved wood elements enhancing her direct address to the viewer.[11] These pieces, along with related works like Girl with open mouth, employed thickly painted or carved protrusions to animate stereotypes and create unease through their physical occupation of space.[11][4]

Performance art

Marjorie Strider actively participated in the avant-garde performance and happenings scene of the late 1960s, performing in events organized by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others as part of the broader New York experimental art milieu. [14] In 1969, she co-organized Street Works, a series of informal public art events and happenings that unfolded on the streets of New York City over several months, collaborating with poets Hannah Weiner and John Perreault. [15] [4] These street-based interventions emphasized ephemeral, site-specific actions accessible to passersby, distinct from conventional gallery exhibitions. For her own contribution to Street Works, Strider placed more than 30 empty gilded picture frames in various random public locations around Manhattan, such as on a fire hydrant, in a tree, and against a painted wall. [4] Over the following months, she extended the piece conceptually by returning to the area and draping a large felt banner inscribed with the words “Picture Frame” in the same vicinity. [4] On March 23 and 24, 1971, Strider presented Cherry Smash at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, shifting to a museum setting. [16] The performance featured ten performers from the S. Henry Cho Karate Center, dressed in white belted karate uniforms, aligned in front of a 40-foot-wide by 7-foot-high white paper wall divided into eight rectangular segments. [17] On shouted commands from their leader, the eight central performers advanced toward the seated audience and performed a sequence of karate blows and kicks in unison. [17]

Soft sculpture and installations

In the 1970s, Marjorie Strider expanded her practice to include large-scale soft sculptures and site-specific installations, frequently employing polyurethane foam to generate flowing, sinuous forms that spilled and interacted with architectural spaces. [18] [11] This material allowed her to create dynamic, temporary interventions that emphasized ooze, tumble, and organic expansion, building on the three-dimensional qualities of her earlier carved canvas works. [19] Prominent examples from this period include Building Work (1976), a site-specific installation at PS1 in New York, where unbridled polyurethane foam cascaded out of windows in renegade pours. [20] Similarly, Blue Sky (1976) at the Clocktower Gallery in New York featured foam oozing down a spiral staircase, transforming the architectural element into a conduit for the material's fluid motion. [20] These works often incorporated domestic objects—such as brooms or ladders—or abstract shapes to heighten their disruptive and emotive presence within the space. [20] Strider continued exploring site-specific installations in later decades, including Sunflower Plaza (1988–1990), an outdoor project at Finn Square in New York that extended her interest in large-scale, environmentally engaged soft forms. [10] Such projects remained temporary and responsive to their locations, underscoring her focus on materiality and spatial dialogue. [11]

Teaching and retrospectives

Strider was a long-time instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she began teaching in 1969 and supported herself for many years through this role.[21][4] From 1982 to 1985, a major traveling retrospective titled Marjorie Strider: 10 Years, 1970–1980 surveyed her work from that decade and toured museums and universities across the United States, beginning at SculptureCenter in New York.[4][22] Strider remained stylistically restless throughout her career, resisting pressures to repeat her earlier successful modes for commercial gain and refusing to become "a factory of art" when a gallery urged her to produce more in her initial style.[4] She continued experimenting and creating into the 2000s and beyond, as evidenced by a 2011 solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York—her first in the city in 15 years—which included more than 40 paintings, reliefs, and sculptures spanning her early career through recent works from 2010.[8]

Personal life

Marriage and personal life

Marjorie Strider married artist and writer Michael Kirby in 1960.[4] Kirby later became a professor of theater and performance at New York University.[4] The couple divorced in 1969.[4] Strider chose not to have children in order to focus on her artistic career. In a 2010 interview she explained, “I never wanted to be anything but an artist. That’s why I never had children. I knew I couldn’t do both and do both well.”[4] She lived in SoHo during its emergence as an artists’ neighborhood, later resided in TriBeCa, and spent her later years in Saugerties, New York, where she died at home.[4] She was survived by her sister, Nancy Rattner, her brother, James D. Strider, and 11 nieces and nephews.[4]

Death and legacy

Death and influence

Marjorie Strider died on August 27, 2014, at the age of 83 at her home in Saugerties, New York.[4][5] Her works are held in public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum) in Buffalo, New York.[23] The Marjorie Strider Foundation, established in her name, continues her legacy by supporting emerging artists through grants and scholarships that fund new artistic production and professional development.[3] It provides targeted assistance, such as scholarships to programs including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.[3] Strider is recognized as a pioneering woman in Pop Art for her satirical subversion of sexist imagery from men's magazines and popular culture, as well as for her innovative fusion of painting, sculpture, and performance that challenged traditional boundaries in postwar American art.[4]

References

  1. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/marjorie-strider-57123/
  2. https://artbridgesfoundation.org/artworks/strider-girl-with-a-raddish
  3. https://marjoriestriderfoundation.org/
  4. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/arts/design/marjorie-strider-sly-pop-artist-is-dead-at-83.html
  5. https://www.artforum.com/news/marjorie-strider-1931-2014-221342/
  6. https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/23286-your-radar-portraiture-met-marjorie-strider-and-meret-oppenheim-moma
  7. https://galeriemagazine.com/marjorie-strider-pop-artists-new-york-pace-gallery/
  8. https://www.hollistaggart.com/exhibitions/77-marjorie-strider/
  9. https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/marjorie-strider-recent-works/
  10. https://artesmagazine.com/2009/11/marjorie-strider-pioneering-60s-artist-remains-a-creative-force/
  11. https://www.cityarts.org/strider
  12. https://www.gmurzynska.com/exhibitions/marjorie-strider-girls-girls-girls/press-release
  13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/natashagural/2022/11/29/marjorie-strider-subverts-male-gaze-reclaims-her-rightful-role-in-pop-art-history/
  14. https://www.artsy.net/article/joanne-artman-gallery-material-girl-the-work-of-marjorie-strider
  15. https://jacket2.org/commentary/hannah-weiners-poems-marjorie-strider
  16. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-drama-review-tdr/article/cherry-smash/FF825C70CAEFCFC2A168A2FE8DF10C70
  17. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/FF825C70CAEFCFC2A168A2FE8DF10C70/S0012596200539480a.pdf/cherry-smash.pdf
  18. https://www.artforum.com/columns/sarah-k-rich-on-marjorie-strider-1931-2014-222056/
  19. https://www.artsy.net/artist/marjorie-strider
  20. https://www.wikiart.org/en/marjorie-strider
  21. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/marjorie-strider-papers-8672/biographical-note
  22. https://www.jeannoelherlin.com/product/marjorie-strider-marjorie-strider-10-years-1970-1980-2/
  23. https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/198017-sliced
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