Edelheit studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University in the 1950s. Among her influential teachers were the Michael Loew and the art historian Meyer Schapiro. She joined the downtown avant-garde and became associated with the Reuben Gallery, an artist-run gallery on 10th Street, where her first solo exhibition took place in 1960. Alongside Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Whitman, she pushed the boundaries of sculpture, painting and artistic creation through happenings and experimental objects.

By 1962 Edelheit began exploring tattooing as a subject. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 memoir Tristes Tropiques, which proposed that tattooing may have been the earliest art and that the human body was the first canvas, Edelheit treated flesh as a site where the dreams and fantasies of her models appear. These tattooed figures later evolved into images of circus performers whose contorted bodies and costumes suggest a frank, sometimes sadomasochistic sexuality.

Photo credit : Sam Glass