Edwin Schlossberg Art captures full breadth of visionary artist whose work is in permanent collections of Guggenheim, Met, and MoMA

New York, NY (April 30, 2018) – Before winning acclaim around the world for transforming how people experience museums, stores, and public spaces, Edwin Schlossberg made a name for himself as an artist and poet who invented new ways of combining poetry, images, and unconventional materials to create stunningly original visual and linguistic worlds.

Today, Schlossberg unveiled Edwin Schlossberg Art, an online collection showcasing 400 artworks from Schlossberg’s influential five-decade artistic career, from collaborations with friends from the 1960’s New York arts scene like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist, to works on permanent display in such public institutions as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The site provides audiences with a look at another side of Schlossberg, who has become better known in recent decades for the work of his experience design studio, ESI Design. ESI has created large-scale interactive environments and exhibits for the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate, Sony, eBay, and the upcoming Statue of Liberty Museum (opening in 2019).

Schlossberg began his artistic career fifty years ago, quickly distinguishing himself from his contemporaries by experimenting with words and images in untraditional ways – some of his earliest works were poems written using a typewriter on aluminum foil. His first book, WORDSWORDSWORDS, with an introduction by Rauschenberg, was exhibited at the Jewish Museum in 1968. The poems were presented in an aluminum box, and the last poem, printed on four sheets of Plexiglas, broke apart when the reader picked it up. It has since been exhibited all over the world and is now in the collections at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Wright Museum at UCLA.

The site features works from Schlossberg’s 16 solo exhibitions, including his first public exhibit, Visual Presence (1981, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY), Then/Now (2015, Hiromi Yoshii Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan), and From Here (2016, Hiram Butler, Houston, TX), a collection of 41 drawings based on photographs taken by the artist from the window of plans and out the window of his New York studio.

The seeds for the Edwin Schlossberg Art site took root when Schlossberg participated in WORD: Text in Contemporary, a 2017 exhibition curated by Karen Conway, the director of exhibitions at the Jamestown Arts Center in Rhode Island. Recognizing Schlossberg’s unsung role as an artist, Conway made it her mission to put his work online. The result is a comprehensive collection of paintings, sculptures, and word art that offers unique insight into Schlossberg’s ever-evolving embrace of unconventional media and technology including vinyl, Plexiglas, aluminum, liquid crystal whose colors change depending on ambient or applied temperature, copper, Scotchlite, highway sign sheeting, rice paper, bamboo, and bronze.

“Edwin is such a creative visionary that his groundbreaking experience design work for museums and public spaces has often overshadowed his hugely influential work as an artist,” said Conway. ” By finally bring all his work together in one place, audiences now have an opportunity to fully appreciate his artistry and innovation in pushing the boundaries between art, poetry, and materials. My hope is that his rich legacy will find the attention it so rightly deserves.”

“I’m grateful to Karen not only for helping me to finally present my archive where it can be experienced by new audiences around the world, but also for inspiring me to take a close look at my complete body of artwork for the first time,” said Schlossberg. “Looking backward can have a way of stimulating new ideas for moving forward in terms of both my artist and design work.”

Conway spent six months working with Schlossberg to curate content for the site, which was designed by an ESI Design team led by Yuri Sunahara, Director of Creative Technology. While many of the images were available in Schlossberg’s personal archives, Conway also tracked down older photos and installation shots as well as photographs of Schlossberg and many of the artists with whom he collaborated.

Conway has been the director of exhibitions at Jamestown Arts Center, RI for the past four years. She has worked as a curator, gallery director, collections manager, program coordinator, and research consultant for institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Vivian Horan Fine Art, Newport Art Museum, and Heritage Museums and Gardens, as well as numerous private collections.

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For information contact:

Patrick Kowalczyk, patrick@pkpr.com

PKPR, 212.627.8098