Arleen Schloss (born December 12, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American performance artist, video/film artist, sound poet, director and curator[1] of the lower Manhattan art, video, performance art and music scenes. Schloss began her influence through A's – an interdisciplinary loft space in New York City that became a hub for music, exhibitions, performance art, films and videos. Artists and performers such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Bogosian, Phoebe Legere, Sonic Youth, Liquid Liquid, Carolee Schnemann, Alan Vega, Martin Wong, and Aei Wei Wei performed, exhibited and got their start at A's. [2] In the 1990s A's became A's Wave where website works and other forms of digital media were shown.
Concurrently with A's, Schloss established herself as a curator, co-organizing shows at Danceteria and The Storefront of Art and Architecture, now an architectural venue in New York.[3]
Schloss operated as a performance artist in the 1970s.[4] The New York Times stated that her performances were "superior to much performance art."[5] and the SoHo Weekly News noted that her voice was "musical the way Patti Smith or Yoko Ono are musical."[6]
Schloss studied at the Bank Street College of Education, the Art Students League of New York, and Parsons School of Design and graduated from New York University. Schloss started her career in the galleries of SoHo, Manhattan and the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a painter and performance artist who performed and showed her work in the U.S., Europe and Asia at venues such as the Franklin Furnace, Betty Parsons Gallery, Bykert Gallery, Construction Company, Max Hutchinson Gallery in SoHo, Lenbachhaus Galeria in Munich, La Nuit Parcourt La Ceil in Belgium, Cafe Einstein in Berlin, The Kitchen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In subsequent years she performed her media opera "A.E.BLA BLA BLA" at Ars Electronica in Austria and was a featured guest on Willoughby Sharp's Downtown '86, which showcased 1980s performers, artists and musicians.
Additionally, during the 1980s, she began to get noticed for her sound poetry work, mostly for the audio piece "How She Sees It By Her." Schloss' sound work is included in two publications and anthologies, "Just Another Asshole," a short-lived no wave art/music/sound art magazine publication published by Glenn Branca and Barbara Ess[7] and "Text-Sound Texts" Edited by Richard Kostelanetz.
Schloss was awarded an 8mm camera from Canon to experiment with 8mm video.[8] With the camera, she created the travelogue video Sun Daze Away, which showed at Central Park's Summerstage and at various venues in Europe and Asia. In 1990 Schloss directed and produced the video documentary "FromKepler2Cyberspace", with Hi8 equipment loans from Sony. This document featured the pioneers of virtual reality, including Dr. Marvin Minsky, John Perry Barlow, Timothy Leary, William Gibson and Jaron Lanier. During the same period, Schloss filmed a series of interviews with John Cage and included those interviews in a series entitled "Windows of Chance/Change." Nickelodeon, because of her video work and art in dealing with the alphabet and children, hired Schloss in 1989 to direct and produce 15 live video excerpts for the animated TV series Eureeka's Castle, which won a Cable ACE Award.
In the 1990s Schloss continued her work with new forms of art and media. She exhibited her electronic work "Marbelize" at the international digital and technology show at ISEA, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and showed multimedia work on the digital art, radio and Internet program ArtNetWeb. Art Dirt In-Port Performance 3/25/1997
Schloss received grants, awards and residencies from The Experimental Television Center, Creative Artists Public Service Grant, New York Foundation of the Arts, Harvestworks, Allied Productions and the Ford Foundation. She is on the board of Art & Sciences Collaborations Inc, and her work is in the collections of the Fales Library, AT&T, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Donnell Library.The New York Underground Museum documents her entire work.[9] A documentary about Arleen's life, called Wednesdays at A's, is currently in post production. Schloss lives in New York City.