It is with great sadness that the Inspiration Art Group International announces the passing of our beloved member Rosalind Schneider, who lost her battle to heart disease on January 3, 2024.
Up until her last days, she radiated amazingly sharp and swift mental acuity at age 91. In her lifetime, she has been a virtual artistic tour de force, a trailblazing advocate for woman artists and a pioneer of avant-garde filmmaking, as well as a visionary and innovative painter.
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.
Rosalind 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.
Her recent work evoked abstractions of bold, transformed landscapes, highly textured, saturated in color and light, creating the illusion of movement and lively vibrancy.
On October 14, 2023, the Inspiration Art Group International premiered her newest video Dissolving Landscape at the Studio Theater in Exile at Hudson Valley MOCA as part of the 2023 Address Earth Art Expo.
Rosalind 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. I seek an expansion of images and the ability to create what moves me, with passion. I use technology to enter that realm. Then, I work it with my hands. It’s a fusion of materials and the mind. It is the personalization of landscapes so that the image can allow experience expansion. If there are lines to cross, I want to cross them.”
She crossed them all. We will miss her greatly.