Marjorie Strider

Marjorie Virginia Strider was born on January 26, 1931, in Guthrie, Oklahoma. She studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute and is also reported, with some conflict among sources, to have attended a public university in Oklahoma, cited variously as Oklahoma State University or the University of Oklahoma; no source confirms a specific degree or exact years of study. She moved to New York in the late 1950s to early 1960s, initially supporting herself with commercial art work.

Her breakthrough came in January 1964, when she showed the carved and painted panel work Green Triptych, featuring bikini-clad women with three-dimensional breasts projecting from the surface, in the First International Girlie Show at Pace Gallery, alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Rosalyn Drexler. Pace gave her solo exhibitions in 1965 and again from December 1965 to January 1966. Through the 1970s she moved further off the wall, building soft sculpture installations in urethane foam that spilled out of windows and down staircases, and she continued to produce site-specific outdoor and gallery installations into the 1990s and 2000s, including projects in Sarasota, Florida (1998) and at the Neuberger Museum of Art (1999). She reportedly taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1968 to 2004.

Marjorie Strider died on August 27, 2014, at her home in Saugerties, New York, at age 83, as reported by The New York Times and confirmed by the Marjorie Strider Foundation.

Strider's reputation rests heavily on her role in the earliest Pop exhibitions and on a critical reassessment that accelerated after her death. Writing in Artforum shortly after Strider died in 2014, critic Sarah K. Rich placed her within Pop's early engagement with advertising imagery and gender, and reviewers around her 2022 to 2023 gallery retrospective have continued that reassessment. That body of criticism has repeatedly emphasized her lifelong effort to break the flat picture plane, moving from painted relief into freestanding and site-specific sculpture. The consistent critical thread is that Strider anticipated later feminist readings of Pop by literalizing, rather than simply repeating, the pin-up imagery the movement's male artists tended to treat as neutral source material.

Strider's auction record was set on July 16, 2024, when Girl with Pink Rose, an estate-stamped acrylic and polyurethane work executed in 2014, sold for USD 180,000 at Sotheby's in an online "Contemporary Discoveries" sale in New York, against an estimate of USD 20,000 to 30,000. Market reporting described the result as roughly 73 percent above her prior auction record. Earlier records had climbed gradually, from USD 32,500 for Green Vertical (1964) at Christie's New York in 2010 to USD 86,100 for the same work at a later Brunk Auctions sale; both have since been superseded. The National Gallery of Art's 2023 acquisition of Girl with Rose (1963) for its permanent collection, alongside Galerie Gmurzynska's 2022 to 2023 New York and Zurich exhibitions, has coincided with renewed market attention.

Strider's market is thin by the standards of her canonical Pop peers, with relatively few tracked auction results and a top price, USD 180,000, that remains modest against blue-chip Pop names even after a 2024 record. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance research and verification should run through the Marjorie Strider Foundation, which serves as her estate. Museum-side validation, including the National Gallery of Art's 2023 acquisition and the 2022 to 2023 Galerie Gmurzynska retrospective, is currently running ahead of the auction market, which is worth weighing against any single sale result. Collectors should also note that some third-party databases list slightly different birth years (1934 or 1938); the Marjorie Strider Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, and her New York Times obituary consistently confirm January 26, 1931.