source: lemonadegallery
Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and NYC. In her work she photographs, appears in, augments, and markets her own image. She’s interested in the line, movement, and biography of the female body.
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source: leahschrager
Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and NYC. In her work she photographs, appears in, augments, and markets her own image. She’s interested in the line, movement, biography, and digital virality of the female body. In 2010 she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist. She co-curated the female-positive BodyAnxiety.com exhibition which is featured in the April 2015 issue of Art Forum. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School. Her current project is Ona, an artist and musician, who evolved out of the question of celebrity as art practice. Her first EP, “Sex Rock,” has recently been released, and with an Instagram following of 350k, a retrospective of her first year as a growing celebrity was shown in late February at Superchief Gallery in SOHO, NYC.
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source: leahschrager
When Leah first started making visual art, she was a modern dancer and model. She wanted to use her image in her art, but when she started doing so found that she didn’t own her image – the photographer did – and the only way she could use her image was to create derivative works. As her various pursuits enabled more modeling opportunities, she continued shooting for trade with photographers. This ended with a fallout with a photographer who, though he wanted her to “go further” in their photo shoots, still refused to give her any right to the images. She then worked only with photographers who would sign a co-copyright agreement and then only those who would give her full ownership. Her current images are either selfies or taken by assistants.

She is a proponent of considering the artistic value and merit of selfies, emphasizing the fact that selfies provide the model full legal and economic control over her images. While some (in and out of the art world) consider selfies vapid narcissism, as she says in her recent curatorial statement for Body Anxiety, it’s important for us to start considering selfies an advanced and florid kind of self-portraiture. People are exploring themselves and they are owning their explorations, which should be supported as an alternative to what she calls “man hands” (men selling women’s images as art).

Leah has been compared by various journals and journalists (Culturebot.com, Artinfo.com, Jeff Probst, and Abdejt.com) to such seminal figures as Diane Fossey, Marina Abramovic, Marcel Duchamp, Laurel Nakadate, and Sigmund Freud. She and/or her work have been profiled in 1000′s of media outlets, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Vice, CBS News, ABC News, The NY Daily News, NBC New York, FOX Business News, Playboy Radio, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, The Morning Show Australia, and many others. She has also danced in works by Martha Graham, Trisha Brown, Jose Limon, and Zvi Gotheiner; modeled with Roe Ethridge, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Andrew Tyson and Ben Ritter; choreographed at NY Live Arts, PS 122, On the Boards, 3LD, and 100 Grand; and she has shown her visual and/or performance art at The Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), McLoughlin’s Kyoto (Japan), Chashama Gallery (Queens), The White Box Gallery (NYC), Bronx Art Space (Bronx, NYC), 25 East Gallery (New School, NYC), The Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), and MoMA (NYC). In 2012 she was blackballed by the West Chelsea Artists Open Studios because the director called her a “commercial entity” and “not an artist.” In response she staged her own protest show at the Hotel Americano in Chelsea.