About

Eve Eisenstadt (b. 1953, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist who came of age in the New York City of the 1970s, a pioneer of living loft living in Tribeca (before it was known as such) and a leader in working with handmade paper. In a career that spans five decades, she has worked steadily creating textural abstract images on handmade paper and most recently using oil pastels on linen.
Eisenstadt began at Cranbook in 1974, and after making ceramics, found her way to handmade paper, which she used to create large scale shapes and forms. She knocked on the door of Twinrocker Handmade Paper, a new mill in Indiana, and found that the owners had never worked directly with an artist before. Eisenstadt began to make work from handmade paper that took up entire walls and got noticed. Shortly after, Twinrocker developed programs for artists.
When she moved to New York City in 1978, her first loft was a sublet from Laurie Anderson. She began a working with Dieu Donne papermill and getting recognition. Her work was shown at a Smithsonian traveling exhibition (1978-81), The Drawing Center (1982), Just Above Midtown Downtown (1982), the American Craft Museum (1982) and the Cleveland Institute of Art (1986). The Hadler/Rodriguez Galleries presented a number of solo exhibitions of her work where it was noticed by curators Marsha Tucker and Lowery Sims, among others. Her work was also published in the landmark book The Art of Papermaking by Bernie Toale (David Publications, 1983) and written about in ARTnews.

The work of Elizabeth Murray was an inspiration, and Eisenstadt was fortunate to meet Murray a few times. Other influences are the work of Henry Smith with string games from indigenous peoples, biology and cells, and Japanese design. She makes collage books using Japanese calendars and handmade papers, and has also made printed books with Timothy Barrett, a professor and MacArthur fellow at the University of Iowa.

As a woman artist and a beloved teacher of both secondary school and college, Eisenstadt has heard it all from art world gatekeepers: “You don’t have a look I could sell” and “If you were a real artist, you would be a waitress, not a teacher.” Nevertheless, she has persisted in working to support her family while making art. After her gallery, the Hadler-Rodriquez in Soho, closed when the owners died of AIDS, she continued to work and never stopped. She has shown recently at Carter Burden Gallery, New York, and My Aunt Linda, an alternative space in Berlin, Germany.