Strider’s success in the “Girlie Exhibit” secured her a solo exhibition at the Pace Gallery the following year, advertised as “Girls, Flowers, and Vegetables.” At a time when the boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture were increasingly amplified (most vocally by the critic Clement Greenberg), Strider’s works thoughtfully emphasize the “ambiguous zone where painting and sculpture overlap.” Challenging the flatness of the medium of painting with her volumetric reliefs, she contrasts the flatness of her painterly style—achieved using acrylic paint and unmodulated areas of color—with the three-dimensionality of her resin reliefs, which she termed “build-outs.” One insightful reviewer of her 1965 solo exhibition remarked on the ways in which Strider’s paintings refused to conform to the traditions of the genre or medium: “It makes us a bit uneasy when these monstrous vegetables are no longer satisfied to be painted, when menacing sharp radishes and bulbous tomatoes start falling out of the painting.” 

The hybrid nature of her painted reliefs was integral to the success of Strider’s works. “Purely painted or mixed media pieces done on a flat plane couldn’t give me the feeling I wanted,” the artist explained in a 2003 interview. She emphasized, “I wanted rounder surfaces. More detail and more depth.” To create her “build-outs” the artist initially laminated and carved wood, relishing in how the “sheer physicality” of the process “flew in the face of gender-driven expectations.” She then moved to shaping plastic foam, which she covered with epoxy resin. 

At the forefront of the use of new materials, Strider adopted urethane foam, which takes shape when two chemicals are mixed. Foam soon became a subject of her work, depicting “ooze” from everyday objects. Wittily rendered, the foam suggests a “destruction of nature,” exemplified in many of Strider’s works from the 1970s, where foam seeps through and pushes past Venetian blinds, explodes from fragile packages, and thwarts the attempts of brooms to sweep it away.

Strider’s interest in the formal properties of urethane foam inspired her series of site-specific installations, in which the “ooze” tumbles down stairs, overtakes building facades, and descends from windows. These works contrast with the very masculine precedents set by Jackson Pollock’s explosive action painting drips and Robert Smithson’s “pours,” in which he, in different earthworks, spilled glue, concrete, and asphalt in an exploration of the principles of entropy and chaos. Strider’s candy-colored oozes have taken shape at Vassar College, PS1 in Long Island City, the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, among other galleries and museums. 

In her later years, Strider returned to the subject matter that launched her career in the 1960s. In these paintings, she crops the female form, suggesting snapshots or advertising layouts. These paintings also demonstrate the artist’s continuing interest in the relationship of color and form and show how she accomplishes these formal investigations with great drollness, intelligence, and vivacity. 

Her works “pop,” often quite literally in extending from their supports, but also metaphorically, in the way in which they burst our long-held and improbable bubbles. In this, Strider’s art evinces the characteristic Pop approach, both celebrating and critiquing aspects of modern American life by drawing on a slick, deadpan style associated with advertising. Yet she also moves beyond it, in exploring the very ways in which those subjects are represented, in two and three dimensions, taking up questions at the essence of modernism.