Pop Artist Rosalyn Drexler to Receive Honorary Doctorate at 129th Uarts Commencement

From today’s press release:

Pop Art pioneer Rosalyn Drexler will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree and address more than 500 graduates and their friends and families at the 129th Commencement of The University of the Arts on May 24 at Philadelphia’s famed Academy of Music.

Said UArts President Miguel Angel Corzo: “It gives me great pleasure knowing that the University will honor an artist as committed to her crafts as Rosalyn. The versatility and interdisciplinary spirit of her work exemplifies the spirit of The University of the Arts.”

Vulgar Lives, the latest of her 12 novels, was released in February. An accomplished author and playwright, Drexler has claimed three Obies, an Emmy and four Rockefeller Grants for playwriting. In January 1970, Drexler’s THE LINE OF LEAST EXISTENCE, a new play with rock music, opened at South Street’s Theater of the Living Arts, starring then unknowns Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito and her daughter Rachel Drexler.

More exciting sometimes than discovering hot young talent is recovering older artists from the dustbin of history. Drexler was a mover and shaker in the sixties, exhibiting alongside Warhol, Wesselmann, and Lichtenstein. (She has also had careers as a playwright and a novelist.) Her collage paintings borrow heavily, as did her cohorts’, from mass-media sources: Marilyn, Ernie Kovacs, Chubby Checker, and various unidentified, archetypal movie stills ripped out of magazines, glued on canvas, and painted within fields of bright, often monochromatic color. The seeds of eighties appropriation—Jack Goldstein and Robert Longo, in particular—are here. There’s an instinct, initially, to see these as works created in the past half decade; aside from a bit of age on the paint, they look awfully fresh. Through April 21. (PaceWildenstein, 545 W. 22nd St. 212-989-4258.)

Rosalyn Drexler in the Brooklyn Rail

Rosalyn Drexler
by John Yau

I’ve waited thirty-five years to see this exhibition of paintings and painting-collages by Rosalyn Drexler, which she made between 1962 and 1967. It’s not that I haven’t seen any; it’s that I have never seen enough…