Perpetual

Repurposing the past through a personal lens, Sally Edelstein is an award-winning N.Y. collage artist and writer. She considers herself a visual archeologist digging deep into American mythology, excavating, and examining the social fictions we have told ourselves over the past 7 decades.

An incurable collector of ephemera, she utilizes imagery found in her extensive collection drawing heavily on popular culture from mid-century America and how it both informs our identities and fragments it.

A nationally exhibited artist, she is a multiple awards recipient from the Society of Three-Dimensional Illustrators, The Art Directors Club, and The Society of Illustrators and received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts.

Along with other 20th century artists, her work is included in “Conversations in American Literature, Language Rhetoric, Culture” an AP High School Literature Text Book published by Bedford/ St Martins. In addition to guest lecturing on post war American culture at Fordham University and The New School For Social Research, she has been a consultant for ABC News.

Her essays have appeared in The New York Daily News, The Independent, and The Ethel, and she is the author and illustrator of "This Year’s Girl" ( Doubleday ) a book that visually documents the changes women have experienced through the 1950s and 80s told through the prism of ever changing styles and consumer choices.

Told through both text and illustration her blog Envisioning the American Dream probes the ways that advertising and media steer our perceptions of race, class and gender.

She is currently working on a new book Defrosting the Cold War: Fallout From My Nuclear Family, a layered memoir of her Jewish, N.Y. suburban childhood where family and cultural myths colluded, collided and ultimately fragmented during the duck and cover, new and improved, cold war climate of mid-century America. Weaving personal, history, and pop culture each deeply descriptive essay is a cultural snapshot of a time and place but like a posed Kodacolor print, all is not what it appears to be.