By Audrey Anastasi
Located in Brooklyn, NY
This small-scale, slightly textured, intimate painting could be a Hanukkah or Christmas gift.
Audrey Frank Anastasi is a prolific a visual artist, curator, gallerist, educator, philanthropist, and arts advocate. She works primarily in 2-dimensional mediums: painting, drawing, collage, mixed media, focusing on the human subject. Most of Ms. Anastasi's figurative works are painted with her non-dominant left hand. She has created large bodies of works of birds, animals and birch trees.
She has exhibited in over 20 solo & 200 group shows. Her original “ref-u-gee” series of forced-migration–themed artwork was shown in a solo exhibition from October, 2022 through January, 2023 at the Brooklyn College library gallery in collaboration with the Valentine Museum of Art (VMoA.) Accompanying the show, a limited-edition monograph with over 180 images of passport sized paintings, four 8 foot tall works on panels, and a foreword by Phyllis Braff. The book was printed in 2023 by SIZ Industria Grafica, Verona, Italy.
Additional book and catalog publications include "Stations of the Cross", SPQR press, with an essay by Amir Bey, BREUCKELEN magazine, “Audrey Frank Anastasi” catalog with an essay by renowned feminist art critic Cindy Nemser, and "Collage" with an essay by Giancarlo T. Roma.
Born in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, Audrey was always drawn to art. Her parents had an innate sense of style. Her father's side of the family were immigrant merchants. They owned what was called, in those days, a junior department store. Audrey’s father would arrange creative window displays. And he was a snappy dresser, looking surprisingly elegant in his patterned or pastel sports jackets.
Audrey’s mother, on the other hand, came from a more rural upbringing. Although her maternal grandmother was from Eastern Europe, her maternal grandfather was born in the USA. “Mr. Jew Arthur,” as he was referred to by locals, owned a tavern in a predominantly African-American community, Fairfield, Maryland. Not only did he sell spirits, he definitely partook of them, as well. While still a teenager, Audrey’s mother, Rose Gussie, changed her name to Joyce and headed to Atlanta, Georgia, and later to New York City to be a cosmetician and hosiery model. She also had an impeccable sense of style. And in her picture albums, beside the photographs, were pages upon pages of charming ink drawings of stylish ladies. Of her own formative years, Audrey expresses, “I'm forever grateful that when I was a child, my mother indulged me with regular outings to the library where I emerged with armloads of books, and weekly visits to the Baltimore Museum of Art. There I would pass the gorgeous bust of Queen Nefertiti and the scary mummies on the way to my art lessons. There isn't a single moment of my conscious life when I didn't think of myself as an artist.” Audrey also studied with a local artist, “Miss Mary,” who soon asked Audrey to become a teaching assistant, instructing other students how to observe shapes and tonalities, while faithfully drawing charcoal drawings of classical plaster casts...
Category
2010s Contemporary Art by Medium: Gold
