Anne Sherwood Pundyk

My first role model as an artist was my grandmother, Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, who for 35 years illustrated the Weekly Reader from her drawing table at home in southern Ohio. The quiet, consuming pleasure I witnessed as my grandmother sketched, mixed colors and painted confirmed my own delight in the transporting power of mark making, pure color, and creating worlds of images. My parents reinforced the importance of defending the right to claim one’s own identity—even when it is socially unacceptable to do so—through their pioneering work in adoption. My mother, a practical naturalist, has taught me to honor the natural world and find resilience by doing so in the face of personal challenge.

I have raised my own family in New York City but I consider myself essentially a Mid-Westerner, although I’ve never actually lived in the Midwest. Rather, I derived my Mid-Westerness through my parents, my grandmother, my cousins. Technically, one could say that I’m a New Yorker. I was born in Manhattan, but didn’t return to live here until later as an adult. Or maybe my essential geography is no geography. Growing up, my family moved every few years. Making friends became a craft to cultivate and hone, just like life drawing or collage. This awareness and conscious effort kicks in now in my collaborative art endeavors.

Now I’ve lived in New York longer than any other place, which makes me perhaps a typical New Yorker: here by choice but defined by elsewhere. The dislocation serves to highlight my taste for outsider ideas served up with sophistication and beauty.

Since 2008, when I shifted my attention to learning about philosophy and aesthetics, my circles have expanded exponentially. My critical writing has taken me far from my studio to participate in collaborations within expanded formats. I’ve done projects in academic settings, private galleries, a public commercial space, established non-profit institutions, two major museums and co-created a feminist publication called Girls Against God. I regard these experiences like a collection of kites on strings, anchored by my studio and desk where I synthesize, edit and represent them in new cycles of paintings, videos, installations, performances and texts.

In her book, Gyn/Ecology, radical feminist and scholar, Mary Daly states that despite living in a pervasive, globally androcentric society, “...as long as [women] are alive the Goddess still lives.” Through my paintings, videos, installations, and collaborations, I offer lessons for dealing with the stress of performing break-out roles for women in these unstable times: take risks, get up if you fall, and trust your instincts. Curator Helen A. Harrison wrote in her Guild Hall Museum catalogue essay “...[Pundyk’s] work suggests that understanding requires another interpretive tool, or perhaps a personal surrender to a deeper, less accessible level of cognition. Embedded in my work are my own essential stories; they overlap with older stories such as myths and fables. In so doing, they begin to communicate to others the inaudible truth of the inner self.

Equally important to this delving is the work required to spread the news. Feminist actor, producer, and writer Amy Poehler comments, “I used to say that I wanted to make great art with people I love. Now I have an addendum to that goal: to get things on the air.” Women need more access to the channels of distribution for their work. My work as co-editor with Bianca Casady of the magazine Girls Against God (published by Capricious) is geared to generate discussion and spark personal activism. Speaking your mind in one way to honor the Goddess. Getting time on stage to broadcast your ideas is another.