Rosalyn Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler was born in New York City in 1926. She is best known for her works as a playwright and novelist, but she is also an artist and exhibited with the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. She started her artistic career in the early 1950s making “junk sculptures”, sculptures made from found objects from the urban environment, first exhibiting along with her husband, Sherman Drexler, in 1954 at the Courtyard Gallery in Berkeley, California. She then started making collage paintings, and in 1963 she made her official public debut as a painter.  

Drexler’s use of found objects in her sculpture during the 1950s made her one of the early artists in the assemblage movement.  In the 1960s, she moved from sculpture to painting and started focusing her attention on creating works that incorporated collage and paint on canvas, using bright, non-local color and subject matter that often referenced popular culture. Professor Irving Kaufman specifically recommended Drexler to co-curator Samuel Sachs III after seeing her work in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in August of 1963 (Kaufman, 1963b). 

By the late sixties Drexler shifted her focus from painting to writing, citing the demands of raising her children and the difficulties women faced in making a career in the New York art world. Her  plays, novels, and screenplays have been recognized with an Emmy and multiple Obie awards. Ms. Drexler continues to live and work in New York City. 

- Lillian Shipp, RZ