Born in Bronx, New York in 1926, Rosalyn Drexler first began exhibiting her work during the late 1950s. In 1986, a retrospective of her work—"Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions"— opened at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Her most recent survey exhibition, "Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man," took place in 2006 at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery in New Jersey. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Drexler’s paintings were featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as "Pop Art USA" at the Oakland Art Museum in California; "The Painter and the Photograph" at the Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts; "American Pop Art" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and "Another Aspect of Pop Art" at the P.S. 1 Institute for Art and Urban Resources in New York. In 2010, her work figured prominently in Sid Sachs’ landmark exhibition "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968" at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, as well as "Power Up: Female Pop Art" at the Kunsthalle Wien.
Drexler’s paintings are in the collections of many museums, including the Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College; the Grey Art Gallery, New York University; 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).
Portrait by Bryan Wharton
