Lee Adler

Lee Adler was an American painter and printmaker born in New York City in 1926. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Adler earned a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and later pursued literature studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He eventually returned to New York, where he built a career in advertising and marketing research while studying art at the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and the Pratt Graphics Center. Adler published books and articles on marketing research and strategy while working with firms including Interpublic Group and McCann. 

Adler lived in Brooklyn Heights, where the industrial waterfront and mechanical structures became a major source of inspiration. His sketchbooks from the late 1950s and early 1960s are filled with drawings of rooftops, factories, pipes, machinery, and industrial infrastructure along the shoreline. In the late 1960s, he turned to screenprinting and began building images from gears, pulleys, engines, IBM cards, computer tapes, and electronic components drawn from communication and data recording technologies. He organized these elements into sharply outlined compositions through repetition, geometric structure, and modular arrangements. Many of his works place mechanical forms alongside abstract human-like figures, while others focus closely on the internal structures of machines and electronic systems. Through his paintings and prints, Adler developed a visual language centered on machines, industrial systems, and information technologies in everyday life. 

His first solo exhibition took place at the Salpeter Gallery in 1967, followed by the 1974 exhibition Industry and the Artist at the Hagley Museum. In 1977 and 1978, a traveling exhibition of his paintings and prints appeared at venues including the Albert White Gallery in Toronto, the Lillian Heidenberg Gallery in New York, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the Mint Museum of Art, and the Hermitage Foundation Museum. His work entered the collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. The largest holdings of Adler’s work are housed at the Ulrich Museum of Art, which presented the retrospective exhibition Lee Adler: A Mad Man Amid the Machines in 2020. Adler passed away in 2003.