Edited by Katy Siegel. Text by Hilton Als, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Lobel, Kalliopi Minoudaki, Caitlin Rubin, Allison Unruh.
Painter, novelist and wrestler, Drexler is the great polymath of Pop
Rosalyn Drexler has always moved between worlds. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, she showed sculpture at New York’s Reuben Gallery, a gathering place for artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg who combined installation and performance with traditional media. Drexler took part in Happenings at Reuben Gallery and at Judson Church (years after her own quasi-performance as a female wrestler, memorialized by Andy Warhol in the 1962 series Album of a Mat Queen). Drexler’s collages and large-format paintings of the 1960s open the category of Pop art to technology and politics in a way that feels contemporary today, crossing hard-edge painting with depictions of sex, violence, race and gender role-playing in film and media.
Her writing also crosses high and low genres, comprising novels both experimental and popular, avant-garde theater and writing for television (including an Emmy-winning Lily Tomlin special). In addition to a comprehensive selection of Drexler’s major paintings, Who Does She Think She Is? also recovers the artist’s early sculptures, recently rediscovered and not exhibited since 1960. Documentation of Drexler’s performances and theatrical work, photographs evoking her role in the downtown New York scene and a selection of her books and other archival materials present her work across multiple mediums, offering a comprehensive look at Drexler’s varied career.
Rosalyn Drexler was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. In 1951 Drexler pursued a brief career as a professional wrestler under the name "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire." In January 1964 her work was included in the First International Girlie Exhibit at Pace Gallery, New York. In 1968, Drexler signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Featured image is reproduced from Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Artforum
Prudence Peiffer
Rosalyn Drexler’s life and work appear allergic to the word dull.
Hyperallergic
Leah Triplett Harrington
These works teeter towards abstraction but prevail as figurative renderings of intensely private moments... These pieces of performance come together, creating a chorus of identities that harmonizes in a conflicted but coherent whole.
Harper's Magazine
Christine Smallwood
The catalogue…makes it clear that there’s more than one way to be a star.
Art in America
Raphael Rubinstein
[Who Does She Think She Is] may contain the secret of Drexler's remarkable ability to sustain such a rich oeuvre over so many decades... Drexler has never ceased to leave the big questions open, to be ready to adopt whatever new role, whatever necessary mask, her art requires... She has always been ahead of her time.
Artnews
Samuel Adams
A recent reevaluation of Pop art that goes beyond the largely Anglo-American, white male artists with whom it has historically been associated.
The New York Times
Randy Kennedy
a drop-dead-gorgeous, pop-culture-packed look back at her career, which is starting to get the recognition it always deserved.
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"Take Down" (1963) is reproduced from Who Does She Think She Is?—incredibly—the first major monograph on the "madly and transgressively" uninhibited painter, sculptor, playwright, novelist, critic and sometime professional wrestler, Rosalyn Drexler. Contributor Jonathan Lethem writes, "Rosalyn Drexler, I thought to myself... She'd been praised by Donald Barthelme and Norman Mailer and Annie Dillard and Gloria Steinem and somehow shrugged it all off and stayed underground, irascible, implausible… she touched Pop, she touched Pulp, she touched Porn, she appropriated and satired and surrealed and film-noired, all with an intimacy and eccentricity that made the work a genre of its own." continue to blog
"When I'm angry I work best, you know. I hate certain sons of bitches that are making it and don't deserve it, or when I was a very poor kid and didn't have enough to eat and stuff like that and my relatives were rich and this one and that one was respected and this one and that one went to college and I hated them. You know? And I wanted to show 'em. And that may be very simplistic, but I know that that's in me. I still want to show them. I don't even know who them is anymore." Find this perfectly provocative new Rosalyn Drexler monograph at the ARTBOOK | D.A.P. / Park Life stand (A8, A9, A10) at the inaugural SF Art Book Fair through 5PM tonight! continue to blog
Join us FRIDAY MAY 6 at 192 Books to celebrate the publication of Who Does She Think She Is?, Gregory R. Miller & Co.'s big and bold new monograph on the inimitable artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and former professional wrestler, Rosalyn Drexler. At 7PM, Drexler will appear in conversation with art historian and curator Katy Siegel and acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem. Book signing to follow. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 224 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 GBP £45.00 ISBN: 9781941366097 PUBLISHER: Gregory R. Miller & Co. AVAILABLE: 6/28/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. Edited by Katy Siegel. Text by Hilton Als, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Lobel, Kalliopi Minoudaki, Caitlin Rubin, Allison Unruh.
Painter, novelist and wrestler, Drexler is the great polymath of Pop
Rosalyn Drexler has always moved between worlds. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, she showed sculpture at New York’s Reuben Gallery, a gathering place for artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg who combined installation and performance with traditional media. Drexler took part in Happenings at Reuben Gallery and at Judson Church (years after her own quasi-performance as a female wrestler, memorialized by Andy Warhol in the 1962 series Album of a Mat Queen). Drexler’s collages and large-format paintings of the 1960s open the category of Pop art to technology and politics in a way that feels contemporary today, crossing hard-edge painting with depictions of sex, violence, race and gender role-playing in film and media.
Her writing also crosses high and low genres, comprising novels both experimental and popular, avant-garde theater and writing for television (including an Emmy-winning Lily Tomlin special). In addition to a comprehensive selection of Drexler’s major paintings, Who Does She Think She Is? also recovers the artist’s early sculptures, recently rediscovered and not exhibited since 1960. Documentation of Drexler’s performances and theatrical work, photographs evoking her role in the downtown New York scene and a selection of her books and other archival materials present her work across multiple mediums, offering a comprehensive look at Drexler’s varied career.
Rosalyn Drexler was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. In 1951 Drexler pursued a brief career as a professional wrestler under the name "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire." In January 1964 her work was included in the First International Girlie Exhibit at Pace Gallery, New York. In 1968, Drexler signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
