Nancy Azara

Nancy Azara is an artist and feminist educator best known for her large-scale wood sculptures and mixed media collages. Nancy developed, and continues to work in, a distinct style of sculpture - found wood, carved, ornamented, and mounted. Instinctive chip carving peels off an outer layer of wood, reaching for an essentialized raw experience of the body, of the limbs, exposing flesh and blood. This work explores life cycles, utilizing the metaphor of tree for personhood. Egg tempera, often in reds and pinks, and aluminum, palladium, gold gilding recovers these exposed layers, exploring folkloric stories of women’s roles, goddess imagery, ancient symbols, mystic spiritual traditions, and affirmation of female self. 

​ Nancy works from her studios in Tribeca and Woodstock. She founded an intergenerational feminist dialogue series, (RE)PRESENT: Feminism(s) and Art to encourage discussion across generations about contemporary feminism(s) in the arts. (RE)PRESENT is an outgrowth of NYFAI, The New York Feminist Art Institute, a school she co-founded in 1979. Here, she formalized automatic journal drawing for a class she taught called "Visual Diaries, Consciousness Raising Workshop" as a way to access the unconscious.  This method quickly became popular as a feminist consciousness-raising technique and was embraced in the nascent feminist art community in New York and with groups like Redstockings. 

 Nancy holds annual workshops, teaches, and mentors other feminist artists, sustaining a unique visual, experiential, and pedagogical artistic practice which remains informed by the body, nature, spirituality and her experience as a woman. 

Exhibitions

April 28 - 25, 2022
VOTIVES