Jamie Hood at Bookforum:
Drexler died in 2025. Her own aesthetic identity was less fixed, circuitously arrived at, and, ironically, has been largely effaced from the record. She was born Rosalyn Bronznick in 1926 in the Bronx, near Van Cortlandt Park, a self-described “nice Jewish girl” who broke out of the borough and onto the Upper West Side by attending the High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia). She married at nineteen and became a mother at twenty, and it was about this time, as she told Frieze in 2017, that her education in art properly began. She and her husband, Sherman Drexler, were increasingly entangled in the downtown art scene, frequenting the famous Cedar Street Tavern in Greenwich Village, where Motherwell hosted a weekly salon and luminaries like Rothko, Guston, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and O’Hara were known to idle. Though he worked to support the family, Sherman Drexler had been trained as a figurative painter; Rosalyn Drexler, meanwhile, darted between found-object sculptures, overpainted collages, and figurative work of her own. Their friends were mostly mainstays in the AbEx movement—Rosalyn was especially close with Elaine—but the Drexlers were acquainted with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and George Segal, too. While lifting weights at Bothner’s gym on Forty-Second Street, Rosalyn was recruited by and briefly toured with a troupe of “lady wrestlers” under the alias Rosa Carlo, the “Mexican Spitfire” (that last bit was the troupe’s invention—Rosalyn figured it had to do with the perm she was sporting at the time). During her audition, the man in charge of the troupe asked if her “husband would allow” her to go.
more here.
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