Judy Rifka

Judy Rifka (born 1945) is an American player active previously the 1970s as a painter and video artist. She works heavily in New York City's Tribeca and Lower East Side and has associated with movements coming out of the area in the 1970s and 1980s such as Colab and the East Village, Manhattan art scene.

Rifka took part in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech art performances, the 1980 Colab The Times Square Show, in two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983), in Documenta 7, participated in the 1981 Just Another Asshole project, and acknowledged the cover of Art in America in 1984 for her series, Architecture. These works employed three-dimensional stretchers that she adopted in exhibitions dating to 1982. In a 1985 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor noted Rifka's shift to large paintings of the female nude, which as a consequence employed the three-dimensional stretchers.These works were exhibited at Brooke Alexander Gallery. In a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Bianca Jagger played a setting attacked in tummy of Rifka's three-dimensional nude still-life, Bacchanaal, which was on display at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale.

Rene Ricard said of Rifka in his influential December 1987 Art Forum article virtually the iconic identity of artists from Van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring,The Radiant Child, "We are that luminous child and have spent our lives defending that Tiny baby, constructing an adult going on for it to protect it from the unlisted signals of forces we have no control over. We are that little baby, the luminous child, and our name, what we are to become, is uncovered us and we must become “Judy Rifka” or “Jean-Michel” the pretension I became “Rene Ricard.” The untitled acrylic painting on plywood, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's use of plywood as a substrate for painting. Artist and writer Mark Bloch called her work "imaginative surfaces that withhold experimental laboratories for interferences in sensuous pigment." According to player and curator Greg de la Haba, Judy Rifka's peculiar polygons upon plywood "are accompanied by the most important paintings of the decade".

In 2013, Rifka's daily posts on Facebook garnered a large social media audience for her imaginative "selfies," erudite kind comments, and widely attended solo and action exhibitions, both in Manhattan and as far-off as art6 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and beyond.
Judy Rifka's pop figuration is noted for its excited line and frenetic pace. Joseph Masheck described Rifka in his 1993 book, Modernities, saying that "Rifka’s wit, which luckily keeps happening with her anxious agitation, entails putting tall care into a ‘careless’ look. And in a world charged similar to contending impersonal forces, this is taking into consideration advertising in reverse, ‘pushing’ the individual consciousness in everything its brave fragility."

In the January 1998 event of Art in America, Vincent Carducci echoed Masheck, “Rifka reworks the neo-classical and the pop, setting whatever sources in citation for today’s art-world cognoscenti.”
Rifka, along afterward artists as soon as David Wojnarowicz, helped to accept Pop sensibility into a milieu that incorporated politics and high art into Postmodernism; Robert Pincus-Witten acknowledged in his 1988 essay, Corinthian Crackerjacks & Passing Go that "Rifka’s adherence to process and discovery, doctrine as soon as Abstract Expressionist practice, is of paramount concern though there is nothing dogmatic or pious practically Rifka’s use of method. Playful enthusiasm and delight in discovery is everywhere evident in her painting."

In 2016, a large retrospective of Rifka's art was shown at the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. In 2017, Gregory de la Haba presented a Rifka retrospective at the Amstel Gallery in The Yard, a section of Manhattan described as "a labyrinth of small cubicles, conference rooms and little office spaces that are rented out to teenager entrepreneurs, professionals and hipsters". In 2019 her video Bubble Dancers New Space Ritual was chosen for the International Istanbul Bienali.