Edwin Schlossberg

Before he was known around the world for how he has changed museums, incorporating interactive technology and audience engagement into their core, Edwin Schlossberg was an artist and a poet. Over the last 50 years, Schlossberg has used words and images to create visual and poetic worlds in his art, using various and unconventional media.

Schlossberg developed as an artist during the 1960s in New York, as a member of its dynamic art scene. Despite working with and befriending several of the most famous artists of that era - Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist - Schlossberg's style has always been his own. While his contemporaries played with words as form, Schlossberg insisted on their meaning, creating poetry with a distinct visual style. Some of his earliest works were poems written on a typewriter on aluminum foil - he created a new application for this everyday material whose artistic value now seems obvious.

Schlossberg's approach has always been inventive: he received Columbia University's first combined doctorate (in Physics and English & American Literature), an accomplishment which has enabled him to write poetry and create art on subjects which might intimidate others: neuronal imaging, the earth from above, gravity, systems mapping and other subjects. By making them visual, he has made them legible outside of the technologic and scientific realm.

His artwork has appeared in solo shows and group exhibitions in the United States and around the world. It can be found in private collections and museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, US), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, US), , the Museum of Modern Art (New York, US), the Art Institute of Chicago (US), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, US), Ivorypress Museum (Madrid, ES), the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, ES), the New York Public Library (US), the New Wight Gallery at UCLA (Los Angeles, US), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK). In 2004, he won the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and in 2011, was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. Schlossberg is the author of 11 books and is also the principal and founder of ESI Design, Inc., an experience design studio in New York City which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2017.