Marjorie Strider’s Pop paintings can be aggressive in their seduction, not so much offering visual pleasure as insisting upon it. The works from the 1960s that Strider (1931-2014) called “build-outs” include reliefs depicting women in bikinis—their breasts protruding off the canvas—and closely cropped female faces, mouths agape and ringed by sculptural lips. The grotesque qualities of these pinup-inspired works come to the foreground in Strider’s work of the 1970s: reliefs of bulbous vegetables and sculptures of toxic goo oozing from cheese graters. This exhibition comes at a time when the Pop canon—long dominated by American men—is being expanded through exhibitions like “International Pop” at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. It’s obvious now that no credible history of Pop can exclude mention of Strider; the only question is why it took so long to realize it.
Note: This exhibition is open by appointment only.
Pictured: Installation view of “Marjorie Strider: Come Hither”; at Broadway 1602. Courtesy Broadway 1602.