February 2021 Vol. 2, No.2

Index

Her work has been exhibited to critical acclaim in some of the most prestigious art institutions in the land: The Whitney Museum in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the New York Cultural Center, plus countless others. She had a solo installation in the 2000 Millennium Exhibit in the New York Hall of Science, where her innovative installation was praised by the New York Times. She has also lectured at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Her films from the 1960s and ‘70s are currently being restored and digitized by the Academy of Arts & Sciences, a massive honor for any filmmaker.

She attended the Music and Art High School in Harlem, New York, and studied at the Art Student League in Manhattan, where she was an abstract expressionist painter under the tutelage of the famous Morris Kantor. After a brief stint of studying art at Syracuse University, New York, she later completed her studies at the Empire State College, part of the State University of New York, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.

She was part of the ‘Women Choose Women’ exhibition at the New York Cultural Center. She formed ‘Women Artist Filmmakers’, a collective which promoted and funded an art collaborative, to focus and fund women. She was active within the Soho 20 gallery, one of the first cooperative galleries in New York operated by and for women, where she was featured in numerous large exhibits. The organization showed worldwide and many of the artists rose to international fame. The organization ‘New York Women in Film and Television’ funded several grants for Schneider, for films that are now in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art.

Schneider has a remarkable record of achievements. As an early innovator of abstract film and installation art, she was among the first to get recognized as a breakthrough avant-garde filmmaker, making non-commercial, non-story telling art films. She was the first to show film as an art form at the Hirshhorn Museum. She was a pioneer in projecting film on sculpture and other objects in art installations, to show that projection can work as an abstract experience. Once her film work was accepted as a new art form, others followed.

She started on 8-mm and later 16-mm film, and has now embraced the video medium, currently combining video with multimedia. She starts an image with digital photography or video, often aerial images from airplanes or drones. She then isolates individual frames, which are printed and mounted on sintra board. Next, she works the images, adding drawings, modeling paste and acrylic paint. Last, she adds tiny transparent glass pearls. She incorporated the glass after discovering that is used to illuminate road signs when the car lights are projected on to them. She sourced them, which was no easy feat, and uniquely uses the material to provide translucent elements to her paintings. The combined layered media creates textured surfaces and dimensionality, creating topographical surfaces, magical spheres that are at once earthy and fantastical. “I seek out sites where nature shows itself boldly, mountains, volcanic eruptions, the sea – at once intuitive, yet with reality expanded, an abstraction of reality, reality reinterpreted, in a sense released and recreated. I connect with reflective surfaces on landscapes and water.”

There is a feeling of eternal spiritualism, an organic essence that connects to the core human experience. Especially the tiny glass pearls create a fluid dynamic unlike anything ever seen by this writer, like virtual tiny dancers. You seemingly feel all of the earth’s elements: water, land, even fire and wind. The imagination is unbridled. Nothing stands still. Schneider explained her vision, “Art is my life force. I am not influenced by others. I work on my own original ideas. I am drawn to power sites where the earth is recreating itself. It allows me the power of my vision, the ability to look at a site and pick up what to paint.”

She has seemingly crossed them all and she keeps on going as a powerful, visionary spirit. The Hammond Museum, where she had a solo exhibit, is immensely proud to have her as a member artist. Hammond Museum curator Bibiana Huang Matheis said, “One of the many remarkable aspects of Rosalind Schneider is that you can look at her vast body of work over more than 60 years, and it all stands the test of time. Be it work from the 1960s, ‘70s or any other era, it is impossible to date it stylistically. It is nothing like any other art of that period. She has always been a true original. Her work from 50 years ago looks as if it was done today.”