Market›Carolee Schneemann
Company Profile

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneemann was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneemann was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, saying: "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." Her works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the London National Film Theatre, and many other venues.

Early life and education
Carolee Schneemann was born Carol Lee Schneiman and raised in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania. As a child, her friends described her in retrospect as "a mad pantheist", due to her relationship with, and respect for, nature. As a young adult, Schneemann often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she cited her earliest connections between art and sexuality to her drawings from ages four and five, which she drew on her father's prescription tablets. Schneemann attributed her father's support to the fact that he was a rural physician who had to often deal with the body in various states of health. While on leave from Bard and on a separate scholarship to Columbia University, she met musician James Tenney, who was attending The Juilliard School. Schneemann's image is included in the iconic 1972 collage Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. Early work Schneemann began her art career as a painter in the late 1950s. These works integrated the influence of artists such as Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and the issues in painting brought up by the abstract expressionists. Schneemann focused on expressiveness rather than accessibility or stylishness. She is considered a "first-generation feminist artist", a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Rachel Rosenthal, and Judy Chicago. They were part of the feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s that developed feminist writing and art.