BIOGRAPHY

Visual artist, teacher, writer, designer, publisher, and social activist, Adrienne Leban was born in 1945 in Memphis, Tennessee, raised in Miami Beach, Florida, and has lived in Manhattan since 1967. She earned her B. A. (1967) from the University of Miami in English Literature and art history, and M. A. (1989) from New York University in social theory.

During the last four decades, Leban has created a unique and coherent body of drawings, paintings, and digital visuals in a variety of geometric forms, including geometric patterns of energy, geometric surrealism/fantasy, geometric cartoons, and what she calls "bio-geo" (see Artist's Statement). She has taught thousands of college art students her pioneering curricula which include the courses Originality, Advertising and Graphic Design for Social Change, and Personal Senior Portfolio, grounded in an ethos of lifework rather than job work, since 1969 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Leban's social comment has been published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, DIA Art Foundation's If You Lived Here, and Global City Review, among other publications. She was co-founder and creative director of The City of DIS: A Magazine of Visual Artists' and Writers' Social and Political Expression, 1991-92, published in response to the first Iraq war with such contributors as poets Allen Ginsburg, Bob Holman, hattie gossett, and Hal Sirowitz, visual artists Barbara Nessim, Tuli Kupferberg, and Elliott Barowitz, and social documentary photographer Margaret Morton. Leban's posters and her students' posters for social change produced with her creative direction are in the Permanent Poster Collection of the U. S. Library of Congress.

She has spoken at peace and artists' housing conferences; advocated on radio, television, and in the New York City and State Legislatures on behalf of artists' housing. Leban led the successful effort to enact the NY State "Loft Law" of 1982 (Article 7-C of the NYS Multiple Dwelling Law), which made loft living legal and granted rent-stabilization to thousands of urban loft pioneers. She has been a voice for feminist and humanist issues as well as for local community concerns.

Adrienne Leban is the founder of The Lifework Studio (http://thelifeworkstudio.com), conceived with the purpose of redefining the common conventions of an art "career," and based on the view that everyone has creative power which when tapped makes life more fulfilling, joyful, and healthy. Through publishing books such as Create with Me(TM) and Draw with Me(TM) used by various colleges and the book-buying public to demystify the creative process, and sold in the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Leban encourages the artist in each person.

Eschewing commercialism and standardization, Adrienne Leban has chosen to exhibit her own work primarily in cause-related, non-profit venues, which she continues to do while now making her work more accessible to collectors and the art-interested public.