Audrey Frank Anastasi
Audfa
Mon, Jun 15, 7:07 PM (23 hours ago)
to me
Audrey Frank Anastasi is a prolific artist, working in painting, drawing, collage, mixed media, and printmaking. She is also a curator, gallerist, educator and arts advocate.
Ms. Anastasi has an extensive history of over 20 solo and approximately 200 group exhibitions. Her work is in numerous private and public collections.
Her subjects include feminist works, spiritual themes, forced migration, nature images of birds, animals and birch trees. Since 1990, most of her figurative works have been painted with her non-dominant left hand.
In 2026, she was awarded the Carol A. O’Neill Memorial Award for her painting, Isaac Woodard, Man with No Eyes.
Her original “ref-u-gee” series of 180 paintings on the theme of forced migration was shown in solo exhibitions at the Valentine Museum of Art (VMoA) and the Brooklyn College library gallery. A 440 page monograph with over 180 images and a foreword by Phyllis Braff was published in an edition, limited to 250 signed and certified copies.
In 2005, Audrey and her husband, Joseph Anastasi founded Tabla Rasa Gallery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Arts Council and Hook Arts Media. She is President Emeritus of Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition.
“From my earliest childhood memory to the present day, my identity has been that of a painter and visual artist. At the heart of my studio practice is my quest to reach what is emotionally and aesthetically essential, by working furiously at the intersection of disciplined control, and wild abandon. My process comes from my desire to bypass self-conscious inhibitions in the pursuit of self-expression. In 1990, I felt artistically “reborn” when I started painting with my non-dominant left hand and discovered renewed creative freedom. This, as well as using oversized brushes, gives me speed and fluidity, resulting in either as a fully representational finished painting, or the base on which to build a mixed media collage.
The images I create primarily represent people painted directly from life, with the subject typically casting a gaze back at the viewer. My themes concern “humanity”- my fellow women, forced migration, social justice, civil rights, natural and man-made calamities, as well as the spiritual respite of nature’s continuum.
When utilizing physical collage materials such as torn maps, shards of color, images from printed media, and my own repurposed drawing fragments as my palette, the works become emblematic of the over-stimulation and media bombardment of contemporary society, in concert with the directly observed presentation of a human subject.
For me, the over-arching challenge is to touch the timeless themes iterated in visual art, literature, drama and music throughout recorded history, while staying relevant and responsive to one’s own cultural place in the timeline. In that way, creating artwork can be a powerful and universal vehicle for human connection.”
