Dorothy Podber (September 15, 1932 – February 9, 2008) was an American performance artist.
Husband Lester Schwartz
Queer Places:
Nonagon Gallery, 99 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003
Dorothy Podber (September 15, 1932 – February 9, 2008) was an American performance artist.
Born in the Bronx to a mother who had tried repeatedly to abort her, and to a father who worked for the Jewish mobster Dutch Schultz, Podber was later remembered as a disruptive influence by classmates from West Walton High School.[1] A wild child of the New York City art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, she helped to run the Nonagon Gallery, which showed the work of a young Yoko Ono and was known for jazz concerts by such performers as Charles Mingus. The Nonagon Gallery was something of an anomaly — it was started in 1957 by two women, Dorothy Podber and Eunice “Skid” Shality. According to a 1958 New York Herald Tribune feature, the gallery — “an ambitious art project started by two girls” — was home “not just to painting and sculpture, but to all the arts.” One weekend a month was devoted to concerts; the gallery also showed handicrafts, and anticipated presenting poetry readings. As the New Yorker’s Whitney Balleitt noted, it was a “long, narrow, second-floor room whose fireplace, brooding beams, heavy chandeliers and dark woodwork…give it the air of a Hohenzollern hunting lodge.” On the night Mingus played, admission was $2. The program explained the premise: “Specific works and order are contingent on the rapport between performers and audience and are thus not listed in advance. Both performers and audience will help shape the evening.”
However, her greatest fame—and notoriety—came from her work as a muse and collaborator with more prominent artists. On one occasion in 1964 she visited The Factory, Andy Warhol's studio, and put a bullet through a stack of his silk-screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe, after which she was banned from the studio. These four paintings were thereafter called The Shot Marilyns, and two are among the most expensive paintings ever sold. Podber revelled in her bad-girl reputation. In an interview in 2006, she said: I've been bad all my life. Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty.[2] When funds were low, she found unorthodox ways of making money, engaging in businesses as diverse as dispatching maids to doctors' offices in an attempt to gain access to their drug cabinets, and running an illegal abortion referral service. She did paperwork for B'nai Brith long enough to pick their safe and use its contents on her own check-counterfeiting machine. Her attitude to these enterprises bordered on indifference. "I never worked much," she reputedly said.[3] She was married three times, and had numerous casual liaisons. Her last husband was Lester Schwartz, a bisexual, who had a long-term relationship with actor/director Julian Beck. Podber cited bisexuality as something she and Schwartz had in common.[1]
She had no children by any of her partners. She died in her Manhattan apartment on February 9, 2008, from natural causes, aged 75.
My published books:
