B. Alexandra Szerlip - Writer and Visual Artist

Biography

B. ALEXANDRA SZERLIP is a multi-award-winning writer (two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, two-time Yaddo fellow, MacDowell fellow, Villa Lena fellow (Tuscany), American Library Association awardee, Excellence in Journalism award from Society of Professional Journalists). She has contributed to The Paris Review Daily and The Believer, among other publications, and has worked in professional theater, as a book editor, painter, sculptor and graphic designer. Raised on the East Coast, she lives in San Francisco.

The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth Century America

Rediscovery of a man ahead of his time.

Before there was Steve Jobs, there was Norman Bel Geddes.

A ninth-grade dropout who found himself at the center of the worlds of industry, advertising, theater, and even gaming, Bel Geddes designed everything from the first all-weather stadium, to Manhattan's most exclusive nightclub, to Futurama, the prescient 1939 exhibit that envisioned how America would look in the not-too-distant 60s.

In The Man Who Designed the Future, B. Alexandra Szerlip reveals precisely how central Bel Geddes was to the history of American innovation. He presided over a moment in which theater became immersive, function merged with form, and people became consumers. A polymath with humble Midwestern origins, Bel Geddes' visionary career would launch him into social circles with the Algonquin roundtable members, stars of stage and screen, and titans of industry.

Light on its feet but absolutely authoritative, this first major biography is a must for anyone who wants to know how America came to look the way it did.

VOTED ONE OF TOP TEN ART BOOKS OF 2017

Artist Statement

B. Alexandra Szerlip’s subject matter has run the gamut from Pulitzer Prize poets, Academy-Award winning costume designers, industrial design pioneers, court jesters, Japanese shunga, and sex slavery in S.F.’s Chinatown, to Mixtec snail-dye gatherers, spy technology, Medieval animal trials, 19th century, museum-quality Oriental rugs, the history of invisible ink, the controversial legacy of Charlie Chan, the relationship between alligators and men in the American South, and the history of the ballpoint pen – to name a few.

In 2000, she began creating mixed-media “book sculptures” that proved surprisingly controversial.

In 2022, after a long hiatus, she returned to painting, working mostly with acrylics, but occasionally oils, watercolors and gouache.

Her focus leans toward portraiture inspired by vintage, b/w, anonymous (both subject and photographer) photographs. An overall theme of Mortality /Anonymity has emerged, combined with what a curator friend calls “a gonzo edge.”

“Looking at old photographs,” wrote Roland Barthes, “I’m astonished by the fundamental question: ’Why is it that I’m alive, here and now?’”

‍ As with her writing, her portraits cut a broad swath - from alligator wrestlers, Japanese aviation pioneers, 1930s films and Victorian child criminals to one-man bands, twins, and Belle Epoque postcards transformed into queries about gender politics.

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