Rosalyn Drexler is an ex-professional wrestler whose experience as 'Rosa the Mexican Spitfire' influenced her subsequent work as a visual artist and writer, and who is now becoming recognized as a key feminist voice in the Pop Art movement. Her work is often grounded in her own experience, which includes the sexism and objectification she witnessed and had directed at her as an athlete, and the racism she saw in the American South whilst on tour during her wrestling career. Drexler's stark and colorful painting has an idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable visual style.
Drexler exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, her husband Sherman Drexler and other Pop artists throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, although later art historians have argued that the critical consideration and acknowledgement of her work was limited by her gender until recently. Alongside her visual art practice, Drexler also maintained a very successful theatrical and literary career. She won multiple Obie awards for her plays in New York, and has published nine novels to date, most recently Vulgar Lives in 2007. One of her widely celebrated novels, To Smithereens (based on her experience as a wrestler) was adapted into the film Below the Belt in 1980. Drexler found the change of title objectionable, however, which returns once again to the questions of the representation of women and their stories within mass media that are raised by her paintings.