When she met with her professor, the renowned conceptual artist John Baldessari, to discuss the project, she not only told him who participated and what the drawing sessions were like, but she also shared some of her paranoid thoughts about why she figured some people didn't want to draw her. Fascinated by all of her stories and the inner workings of her mind, Baldessari encouraged her to write about it. Perhaps, he suggested, that she open up the project to include her ruminations.

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Immediately inspired, Jennifer went home and sat at her computer and created a chapter for each person. At the beginning of each chapter, under the person's name, she placed the pair of drawings if they had participated and two blanks squares if they hadn't. She then proceeded to write her uncensored thoughts about why she thought each person did or didn't participate—essentially detailing her relationship with every person in the program.  

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Nine months later 78 DRAWINGS OF MY FACE—part diary, part cultural anthropology was finished. As she wrote, word got out about the project which led to a whole new host of rumors—all of which Jennifer included in the appropriate chapters. Many students and faculty members alike were decidedly rattled by the project. Perhaps no one more so than one professor who dropped her from his class via voicemail, while others, like the artists Charles Ray and Chris Burden begged her not to publish. Others simply avoided her both at school and at art openings.  Jennifer had become a pariah even though no one had yet read the book.

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One person however was particularly interested in the project—author and cultural critic Chris Kraus who was teaching writing at Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design. Kraus would go on to write about 78 Drawings in her book Video Green,  an examination of the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Kraus observed that the value of Schlosberg’s work lay in the way it performs the lived subjectivity of a twenty-six-year-old struggling to access an art enterprise that was in many ways conspiring to exclude her.  Explains Kraus, “I think that 'privacy' is to contemporary female art what ‘obscenity’ was to male art and literature of the 1960s. The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove. Female artists who insist on talking about their private experiences—about sex, pain, drugs, and the ordinary, universal nuisance of living inside a body—will be called ‘immoral’ anyway.”

 

78 Drawings also caught the attention of veteran journalist Pat Morrison who featured Lehr’s project in The Los Angeles Times Magazine (“No wonder Jennifer Schlosberg is driving her Art soul mates nuts.”) which led to coverage in The New York Times Magazine.

 

Twenty-five years later, it continues to amaze Jennifer that such a fuss was made about a book that virtually no one has read of which only 10 copies were published. She remains extremely grateful to John Baldessari for recognizing the writer in her.