DEBRA DREXLER
Professor, Department Chair, Drawing and Painting Area Chair
Office Room 3327 / drexler@hawaii.edu
RESEARCH AREAS - Drawing and Painting
BIO
Debra Drexler maintains studios in both New York and Oahu, and her work is informed by her unique bi-coastal experience. She has had over thirty solo and over 100 group exhibitions in national and international venues. Recently, she has also worked with a number of venues in New York, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, including Van Der Plas Gallery (solo, 2018, solo, 2017; solo, 2015; three person, 2014), Gallery Gary Giordano (two-person, 2017), The Dorado Project (solo, 2016), and H.P. Garcia Gallery (solo, 2009, 2010)). In 2017 she was featured on The Kalm Report and strong reviews in Arte Fuse and Whitehot Magazine in which Jonathan Goodman, described the work as a “new non-objectivity” that “quite accurately describes the spirit of abstract art today, in which painting is struggling to break free of the constraints of time.” New York group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, Exit Art, The Curator Gallery, Ground Floor Gallery, Denise Bibro Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, Creon Gallery, and Art Finance Partners.
Her installation, “Gauguin’s Zombie,” which traveled from the Honolulu Museum (2002) to Maui Arts and Culture Center (2003) to White Box-The Annex, New York (2005), continues to be cited in academic publications such as The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion and Living Death (Rutgers University Press, 2015), by Sarah Juliet Lauro, and the book chapter by Heather Waldroup, “Re-Possessing Gauguin: Material Histories and the Contemporary Pacific,” in Gauguin’s Challenge: New Perspectives After Postmodernism, (Bloomsbury, 2018).
EDUCATION
MFA Painting, 1983-1986, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville<
BA Painting, 1979-1980, Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS
2006 – present / Professor, Drawing and Painting Area, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1997 - 2006 / Associate Professor, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1992 - 1997 / Assistant Professor, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
2000 / Summer Faculty, University of Maryland
1987 - 1992 / Lecturer, St. Louis Community College
1990 - 1992 / Associate Instructor, Maryville University, St. Louis, Missouri
1991 / Lecturer, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
1986 - 1990 / Director/Artistic Director, Riverfaces, Inc., St. Louis, Missouri
COURSES TAUGHT
Art 223 Approaches to Painting
Art 323 Advanced Painting I
Art 324 Painting from Life
Art 113 Beginning Drawing
Art 213 Intermediate Drawing
Art 313 Advanced Painting
Art 410 BFA Seminar
Art 611, 612, 613, 614 Graduate Seminar