ROSALYN DREXLER
with Katy Siegel and Jonathan Lethem
Who Does She Think She Is?
Gregory R. Miller & Co. (2016)
Friday, May 6th, 7:00PM

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
Born in the Bronx in 1926, Rosalyn Drexler first began exhibiting her work during the late 1950s. Since then, she has had over 15 solo exhibitions. Drexler’s paintings are in the collections of many museums, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Wadsworth Athenaeum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In addition to her work as a visual artist, Drexler is also an accomplished novelist and playwright. She published her first play in 1963 and her first novel in 1965. She is the recipient of three Obie Awards, as well as an Emmy Award for her work on Lily Tomlin’s television special Lily (co-written with Richard Pryor).

Katy Siegel is the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University, and Curator at Large at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. Her books include Since ’45: America and the Making of Contempo­rary Art (2011) and “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler (2015). Among her curated exhibitions are High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975 (2006), Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971–1974 (2013), and Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? (2016).

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.