SVARTSJÖ, SWEDEN, May 26, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Martha Edelheit has been inducted into Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Supported by years of professional experience as a fine artist, Ms. Edelheit has earned distinction as the creator of numerous works of art since 1960.
Known as a pioneering feminist artist whose work during the early 1960s addresses female desire, the body and skin as a double "canvas" for tattoo imagery, she studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University in the 1950s. Ms. Edelheit has regularly exhibited her work at the feminist gallery SOHO20 Gallery in New York, which she joined in 1984.
Since 1961, Ms. Edelheit has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including "11 from the Reuben" at the Guggenheim Museum, "Three Centuries of the American Nude" at the New York Cultural Center, "BLAM!" at the Whitney Museum of American Art and "Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City" at the Grey Gallery of New York University. She has also had more than 30 solo exhibitions featured at various venues in the United States, Sweden, Finland and Austria. As the women's art movement flourished in the 1970s, Ms. Edelheit further distinguished herself as an active participant in women-only group exhibitions, including "Women Choose Women," at The New York Cultural Center, "Works on Paper—Women Artists" at The Brooklyn Museum, "Sons and Others" at The Queens Museum, and the traveling collaborative feminist installation, "The Sister Chapel" shown at P.S. 1, and now a permanent installation at Rowan University. For The Sister Chapel, she created her 1977 piece "Womanhero," regarded as a monumental female transmutation of Michelangelo's "David," tattooed with images of Nut, Kali, Athena, Diana and Guanyin, to symbolize women's shared power over the course of many centuries. Ms. Edelheit's erotic works on paper and her series of monumental "Flesh Wall" paintings were exhibited at the Bryon Gallery in the mid-1960s, and most recently at Eric Firestone Gallery in 2018.
During the course of her career, Ms. Edelheit taught filmmaking at Montclair State College and The New School between 1976 and 1980, and from 1973-1976, was artist in residence at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Cincinnati, (film) and the California Institute of the Arts. Her films are in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, New York. In the 1970s, she created set designs for off Broadway New York theaters and made several experimental films. Ms. Edelheit designed and built the sets for "The Wonderful Adventures of Tyl" by Jonathan Levy at the Triangle Theatre in 1971, and "Message from Garcia" and "Was I Good?" two one act plays by Rosalyn Drexler featured at the New Dramatists Workshop. In 1974 she did sets for "The Whore and the Poet," by Sandra Hochman and "Break A Leg," by Ira Levin at the Urgent Theater. She also did sets for Cirque Gregoire's performance on the lake in Central Park, NYC. Her experimental films from the 1970s have most recently been shown at The Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Filmmuseum at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria in 2019.
A dedicated civic advocate, Ms. Edelheit earned distinction as a member of Fight Censorship, which was composed of several women artists whose work focused on eroticism. These artists lectured and educated the public on erotic art and the negative effects of censorship on art and society. In addition to Ms. Edelheit, other artists involved in the collective included Louise Bourgeois, Anita Steckel, Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, Hannah Wilke, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Eunice Golden and Joan Glueckman. In 1977, she became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press. She joined Women in the Arts and the Women's Caucus for Art in 1973. In 1974 she became a member of Women/Artist/Filmmakers Inc. Since 1984 she has been a member or associate of SOHO20 Gallery. She is represented, since 2018, by the Eric Firestone Gallery, New York.
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