ANNE SHERWOOD PUNDYK

Born in Manhattan, ANNE SHERWOOD PUNDYK spent much of her childhood moving between the two coasts, but it is her family’s deep mid-Western roots that recur throughout her work. Pundyk, having settled and now raising her own family in Manhattan, learned to read the mesmerizing gaze of heirloom chairs and cups from her mother. From her activist father, she grasped the importance of defending the sometimes socially unacceptable urge to know one’s own identity. Taken together, Pundyk has come to understand that painting is a self-defining stance.

Pundyk’s earliest exposure to artistic commitment comes from her grandmother, artist Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, who studied with members of the Ashcan School at the Art Student’s league. Pundyk’s formal studies of art began at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington DC, continued later at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She received a BA in Fine art from Pomona College in Claremont, CA, winning the Mary Drew Art Award, and completed an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

An artwork, Pundyk posits, has the potential to express a complete world, if undertaken fearlessly. One can feel in the work the concept of the body as a key for translating core ideas of identity. The communion between artist, subject and audience spins off of a series of linked moments of recognition, pairing imagination and understanding.

Pundyk’s work has been shown nationally and is included in private collections here and abroad, and in corporate and institutional collections.

☁ ANNE SHERWOOD PUNDYK