Martha Edelheit


Martha Nilsson Edelheit, also known as Martha Ross Edelheit, is an American-born artist currently living in Sweden. She is known for her feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s, which focuses on erotic nudes.

Early life

Martha Ross was born September 3, 1931 in New York City. Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1951, at New York University in 1954 while concurrently studying art with Michael Loew, and at Columbia University in 1955 and 1956, where she studied art history with Meyer Schapiro. In the mid-1950s she married psychoanalyst Henry Edelheit, when he was a medical student at University of Chicago.

Career

Since 1961, Edelheit has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 11 from the Reuben, Three Centuries of the American Nude, BLAM!, and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965. Throughout the 1970s, as the women's art movement flourished, Edelheit was an active participant in women-only group exhibitions, including Women Choose Women, Works on Paper—Women Artists, Sons and Others, and the traveling collaborative feminist installation The Sister Chapel.
Womanhero, Edelheit's painting for The Sister Chapel, is a monumental female transmutation of Michelangelo's David, tattooed with images of Nut, Kali, Athena, Diana, and Guanyin to symbolize women's shared power over the course of many centuries.
Edelheit has also done production design for smaller theaters in New York from 1971 to 1974, a number of own experimental art films in the 1970s, demonstrated in a number of contexts in the U.S. and Europe over the years, such as Hats, Bottles & Bones: A Portrait of Sari Dienes an artist portrait on Sari Dienes, shown including the Museum of Modern Art and is included in collections at the Anthology Film Archives. She has taught in filmmaking 1976 to 1980 and has been invited as artist in residence at Wilson College located in Chambersburg, Philadelphia in 1973, Art Institute of Chicago in 1975, the University of Cincinnati in 1975 and the California Institute of the Arts.

Activism

Martha Edelheit was a member of Fight Censorship, founded by Anita Steckel. Fight Censorship was composed of several women artists whose work focused on eroticism, including Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, Hannah Wilke, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Eunice Golden, and Joan Glueckman. They lectured and educated the public about erotic art and the negative effects of censorship.
In 1977, Edelheit became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.
Edelheit was a member of Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc, the Women's Caucus for Art and an associate member of Soho20 Chelsea Gallery.

Sweden

Since 1993 Martha Edelheit has been a resident of Sweden. She lives on a farm in Svartsjölandet outside Stockholm after her marriage to her childhood sweetheart Sam Nilsson.
Before moving to Sweden, she painted a lot of people and mysterious landscapes of quite own style, but after leaving New York and come to the Swedish nature-oriented way of life, her work has shifted towards painting animal motifs; something she sees as a manifestation of hope to a wounded world.

Theatre sets