By RANDY KENNEDY
SEPT. 5, 2014
Marjorie Strider, a Pop artist
who slyly subverted her male counterparts’ takes on consumerism and the female
form, creating images of packages that oozed their contents and women whose
curves jutted from the picture plane, died on Aug. 27 at her home in Saugerties,
N.Y. She was 83.
Linda Rattner Celle, a niece,
confirmed her death but did not specify the cause.
Ms. Strider was among the first
wave of New York Pop artists and was included in “The First International
Girlie Show” at the Pace Gallery in 1964, along with several soon-to-be stars
of the movement, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann.
She said she did not initially think of her works as Pop, but had grown bored
in the 1950s making paintings that were perspectivally flat and began adding
things like cardboard and wood to the surface to make them more sculptural.
She did this with paintings of
plants and vegetables but also with bright triptychs of bikini-clad women,
adding what she called “build-outs” to make the breasts and bottoms of the
women emerge realistically out of the image, a challenge to the passive gaze.
She described her pinup
paintings as “a satire of men’s magazines,” and they — along with “Girl With
Radish,” a 1963 work showing a woman’s cartoonish face with her mouth
suggestively open and a bright red radish clamped between her teeth — remain
some of her best-known pieces. But Ms. Strider was stylistically and
intellectually restless and quickly moved on to other kinds of work, which
rarely received the attention of her early paintings.
Berta Walker, the owner of a
gallery in Provincetown, Mass., who knew Ms. Strider for many years, said that
she “refused to be a factory of art when her gallery asked her — her downfall
and her saving.”
Marjorie Virginia Strider was
born on Jan. 26, 1931, in Guthrie, Okla., the second of five children. Her
father was a cement contractor and her mother was a secretary at an Air Force
base near Oklahoma City and also led local campaigns to improve literacy.
Ms. Strider attended the Kansas
City Art Institute in Missouri and Oklahoma State University and worked
designing shoe-store window displays before moving to New York in 1957. “I
never wanted to be anything but an artist,” she said in a 2010 interview.
“That’s why I never had children. I knew I couldn’t do both and do both well.”
In 1960 she married the artist
and writer Michael Kirby, who later became a professor of theater and
performance at New York University. They were divorced in 1969. She is survived
by a sister, Nancy Rattner; a brother, James D. Strider; and 11 nieces and
nephews.
She supported herself for many
years teaching at the School of Visual Arts, living in SoHo when that
neighborhood was just emerging as an artists’ neighborhood and later in
TriBeCa. In 1969 she was one of the organizers of a group of artists and poets
who staged an influential public performance over several months called “Street
Works.”
In them, Vito Acconci followed
random strangers, being photographed as he did so. Adrian Piper recorded street
noise and replayed it later, at double speed, walking in the same area where
she had recorded it. For her own work, Ms. Strider hung more than 30 empty
gilded picture frames in various places on the streets: on a fire hydrant, on a
tree, against a painted wall. She then returned to the idea over several
months, making it more conceptual as she went; in the area where she had hung
the frames, she returned and draped a large felt banner with the words “Picture
Frame” written on it.
For many years in the 1970s she
worked with urethane foam, creating huge, sinuous installations that seemed to
flow out of building windows or down staircases. Later paintings returned to
the female form but often used it to play with abstraction: a close-up of a
jawline, hair and mouth dissolving into hard line and bright color; a bikini
bottom and legs as a five-triangle composition exercise. From 1982 to 1985, a
retrospective of her work that began at the SculptureCenter in New York toured
several cities in the United States.
At a time when women struggled
mightily for visibility in the art world, Ms. Strider was often fearless and
pointedly droll with her public image. In the winter 1971 issue of the art
magazine Avalanche, she took out a full-page ad showing herself topless, riding
a horse, in a slightly blurry, off-kilter picture that looks as if it could be
the basis for a Gerhard Richter painting. Her perseverance, she said in an
interview with Jonathan Gams, in the 2004 book “Marjorie Strider: Dramatic
Gestures,” was sometimes all that got her through.
“I believed those men who
either outright said or alluded to the fact that women weren’t good enough to
compete in the real art world,” she said. “But thank God it didn’t stop me from
working. I’ve always worked intensely.”