American painter, sculptor and performance artist (1931 - 2014)
Marjorie Strider
Marjorie Strider, is seated, in front of her work,Girl with Radish (1963), in ablack-and-white photograph byFred W. McDarrah. Her subject ispolychrome painted on a flat surface, with three-dimensional eyelashes and lips, and a spherical radish in her mouth.[1][2]
Come Hither,[4] 1963, acrylic on epoxy-coated Styrofoam mounted on masonite and wood panel, 63 inches by 42 inches by 9 inches
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, andperformance artist best known for her three-dimensional paintings and site-specificsoft sculpture installations.
Born in 1931 inGuthrie, Oklahoma,[6] Strider studied art at theKansas 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 thePace Gallery's 1964 "International Girlie Show"[7] alongside other "pin-up"-inspiredpop art byRosalyn Drexler (the only other female[1]),Roy Lichtenstein,Andy Warhol,Ben Johnson, andTom Wesselmann. Her comically pornographicGirl 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 boldfigural 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 thePace 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]
Around this time, forClaes Oldenburg's birthday, Strider made chocolate casts of Patty Mucha Oldenburg's breasts (a plaster version was later acquired bySol LeWitt).[16] Perhaps it was her intimate friendship with the Oldenburgs that led Strider to redirect her artistic focus from hard sculptural paintings tosoft sculpture in the 1970s. She made site-specific installations of unbridledpolyurethane 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 toLynda Benglis' floor paintings andsoft 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 theMcNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. In the 1990s, she began to make paintings with tactile surfaces that were moreAbstract Expressionist thanPop. In 2009 she revisited her original girlie theme, painting new examples which she exhibited at the Bridge Gallery, New York.[citation needed]
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
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
^"Pace Gallery: Beyond Realism May 4-29, 1965".Printed Matter. RetrievedAugust 6, 2025.Catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition held from May 4-29, 1965 at Pace Gallery (New York). Interior illustrations are screen printed on acetate pages and depict works by Paul Thek, Ernest Trova, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Chryssa, Lucas Samaras, Michael Todd, Richard Artschwager, Marjorie Strider, James Rosenquist, and Robert Morris. Text by Michael Kirby on accompanying leaflet.
^K.L., "Marjorie Strider,"ARTnews vol. 63 (January 1965), p. 11; E.C.B., "Marjorie Strider,"ARTnews, vol. 64 (January 1966), pp. 16–17.
^See "Eight Artists Reply: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" ARTnews (January 1971), pp. 40–46. Marjorie Strider and Lynda Benglis are among the eight respondents; their work is illustrated together on p. 44.
Girl with open mouth.[3] 1963 © Michael Chutko
