Roni Hoffman

Artist and photographer

For an artist whose greatest fascination has been reserved for the small and quiet, it’s been a loud, wild ride — from a first group show with Yoko Ono to a photo career shooting rock stars.

She's earned a gold record for designing a Blue Öyster Cult album. She’s photographed Elvis Presley, Muddy Waters, Patti Smith, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa, the Isley Brothers, the Clash. And she shot the back cover and inner sleeve of The Dictators Go Girl Crazy, the first punk album. She was friends with Patti Smith when the future rock ‘n’ roll hall of famer lived in the Chelsea with Robert Mapplethorpe. As a teenage photographer in 1967, she was there when Jimi Hendrix’s helicopter landed on the Pan Am (now Met Life) building upon his return from London. She has shared a joint with Jim Morrison and Nico, had dinner with Lou Reed and sangria with Charles Mingus, who gave her his self-published manual on how to toilet-train your cat. Her picture of her next-door neighbor Lester Bangs is on the cover of his biography and in the Almost Famous DVD. More photos toured with How to Be a Rock Critic, the Lester Bangs play, and are included in the doc, Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine. Twenty-eight of her photos of Alex Chilton and the infamous Rock Writers Convention lead off the film Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me.

As a fine artist, she likes to work small. Most of the work in this portfolio is no larger, edge to edge, than 8 x 10 inches. This reflects her lifelong attraction to life's secret corners, as well as her enduring aversion to art that's overblown. She paints and draws in a variety of media, including gouache, watercolor, oils, pastel, pencil, charcoal, paper, wood, metal, bamboo and found objects.

Roni’s work was recently included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibit about New York’s legendary JAM Gallery, where she had her first solo show, and in the Museum of the City of New York show called New York at its Core. She has also had a solo show at Jacqueline Anhalt in LA and been part of many group shows — at Kathryn Markel and Alex Rosenberg in NYC, the GE Gallery in Connecticut, as well as the galleries of NYU, U of Massachusetts, U of Maryland, and Hofstra.

She was raised in Coney Island (the favicon in the browser tab is the H from the Wonder Wheel sign) and, at Lincoln High School, studied under Leon Friend, who invited her to join his famous Art Squad. She earned her BFA at Hunter College in Manhattan. She lives now in the Bay Area and is married to Robert Duncan, a former editor of Creem. They have two children, a daughter, who is a writer, published poet and mother of two, and a son, the former publisher of Vice Russia, now a writer in Detroit.

Roni’s latest solo show, combining art and photography, opens at the Gospel Flat gallery in Bolinas, November, 2023.