Draft:EiLeen Doster



EiLeen Doster (born in Ridgewood, New Jersey) is an American painter, poet and community activist who lives in the East Village, New York City. Doster studied painting and art education in New York City at the School of Visual Arts and SUNY/Empire State College. Doster is one of the women artists who are members of the Rivington School, an artist movement that originated in the Lower East Side in the 1980s. .  She is also a member of the Art Loisaida Foundation, an arts and cultural organization based in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Doster worked for decades as an early childhood art and nature educator in New York City neighborhood schools, libraries and gardens. She has worked in film and animation and is a published poet.

Work
Doster has developed a style of painting that encompasses many influences in everyday life. From faux-folk-art portraiture to still-life and depictions of abandoned hotels, Navajo and Christian holy sites and haunted Celtic graveyards. In 2002, Doster created a series titled Nature Morte : “Spun out figuratively and quite literally from Doster’s long prior fascination with dishes - as both formal subjects and domestic signs - the accelerated circularity barely contained in these dense compositional compressions offer up a renewed vision of this most universal shape as an emotional multiform” (Carlo McCormick).

Doster paints images that are “tropes, symbolic metaphors not intended to be realistic depictions of objects but elements of her unique imagistic vocabulary” (Michael Carter, in Un-Still Life Gears, gyres and the undulations of objects in the paintings of EiLeen Doster, 2001). New York City artist Susan Strande wrote “EiLeen’s marks transform themselves in an existential way. Doster is of those meant to be a painter’s painter.” In 2020, Doster received the Acker Award in Painting at the 2020 Acker Awards, an award named for Kathy Acker and launched in 2013 to acknowledge living and deceased members of the San Francisco or New York avant-garde art scene.

Doster has shown her work in numerous galleries including:  The Cork Gallery, Lincoln Center, The Queens Theater in the Park, City Without Walls, Maxwells, O Roe Electric Art Space, Phoenix City Art Gallery, Torn Awning Gallery, Cuando, 8BC, Ground Zero Gallery, Ridge Street Gallery, The Container Gallery,  Drink Me, Mosaic Books, Uzi Gallery, Be Gallery, Jack Light Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, The Chocolate Milk Gallery, The School of Visual Arts, The Third Street Music School Settlement, The East Village Dance Project Avenue C Studio, The New York City Public Library, The Sixth St. Community Center, La MaMa La Galleria, The Theatre for the New City, Theresa Brynes Gallery, Howl Happening Art Gallery, The Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens Festival and the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Archive

Doster’s poetry and writing has been published in Shrew, New Brunswick Literary Outlaw, Black Swann Review, Big Hammer Magazine (2017), Manilla, Sub Rosa, Typewriter Tales and Howling Women.

Published Writing
Shrew, A Literary Zine, Issue #1 (March 2018), Virtual Gallery: EiLeen Doster Shrew, A Literary Zine, Issue #2, Part Three (April 2018), Poem for my Daughter and The Girl Next Door New Brunswick Literary OutlawBlack Swann Review