Nancy Azara carves, assembles and paints wood, often with gold and silver leaf and encaustic. The wood, the paint and the layers that make up the sculpture record a journey of memory, images and ideas. Azara has been carving in wood for many years. In her own words: “It has felt like a good “fit” for me as I have always admired trees and I often even as a child felt that they held a metaphor for my experience of life”. Her work has been about the unseen and the unknown, and most recently, about the cycle of time, the death of her mother, the birth of her granddaughter and her own aging.
For several decades Nancy Azara has been making sculpture. She came of age during the feminist movement of the 1960s, and was a founder of the New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI) in 1979 and served on it’s board. Azara has widely exhibited in galleries, institutions and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as the New York Times, Art In America, Artforum, and Sculpture Magazine. She is the author of the book “Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art” and an essay, “In Pursuit of the Divine” for “The Kensington and Winchester Papers: Painting, Sculpture and the Spiritual Dimension”. She has been a visiting artist in the United States, Europe, Taiwan, and India. Azara is the recipient of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the Susan B. Anthony Award, and a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship. Azara’s work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the MoMA, Yale Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum, among others.
