Anne Stanner

My Story

 On a cold and stormy November morning in 1943, my mother toddled down the block to Physicians Hospital in Jackson Heights, Queens, with labor pains. At 6:30 am I was born. That was one of the last times that I did anything that early in the day. Nineteen and a half years later, I did the same thing and at 3:30 pm my daughter, Sharon, was born at Physicians Hospital, delivered by the same family doctor who delivered me.

In between those two momentous events and ever since the latter one, I have pursued my artistic career, first as a serious avocation and later as a career. As I needed to earn a living to support Sharon, I wound up working for The City of NY, first as a teacher and then as a management planner. All along, I would do artwork at night and weekends. I went back to college at age 34 to obtain a Master of Fine Arts degree at City College of NY, while working part-time in the Dept of Education.

Family visits to the beach on Long Island instilled a love of the ocean which has stayed with me my whole life and has inspired my sculpture. I still feel the sensation of the calmness of floating in the sea, gently rocked by waves and the exhilaration of diving under or swimming along with really big, cresting waves as they crashed onto the shore. The power and rhythm of the ocean have never left me.

Until the age of 14, I was fortunate to spend most of every summer, along with my mother and sister, at my aunt & uncle’s farm in Gardner, Massachusetts, situated at the end of a dirt road. They raised chickens and had vegetable and flower gardens. They had cats and a dog, which we never had in our apartment in Jackson Heights, and I was enamored with them. I helped my aunt collect eggs, weed the garden, and pick vegetables for dinner. My mother’s background was Finnish, and at the farm we were surrounded by Finnish language and culture, such as having kaffe aika (coffee time) each afternoon, with desserts and drinks, and going to the wood-fired sauna down the road every Saturday evening. After, we walked back in the cool night air and had supper. (My father had to work, so he stayed home but would come to spend his two-week vacation with us.)

At the time, I was enthusiastic about horses, and found that one lived down the road. He belonged to a teenager who didn’t ride him much and she let me come to the barn, groom the horse, and then take him out for a ride. I felt wild & free, riding him up on a small mountain and into the woods. To me he was a powerful stallion, though in reality, he was a 30 year old retired police horse and quite tame. Years later, horses inspired some of my sculptures.

Back home in Jackson Heights, I attended the local public schools, and hung out with my friends. We went bike riding and roller skating all over the area, and went to the double feature, cartoons, and news feature at the local movie theater on Saturdays. I took ballet and acrobatics lessons and as a teenager, I went to the ice skating rink at Flushing Meadows, and went bowling. Once in a while, I went horseback riding in Forest Park, Queens.

My mother was an amateur painter, and she would lend me her oil paints, brushes, and canvas board as I was growing up, especially if I was home sick with one of those childhood diseases, like chicken pox, measles, and mumps or with an ordinary cold. I also liked to glue together little constructions, like stone or shell cairns. This was the beginning of my interest in art. Later in Junior HS, I became fast friends with Fran. Her father, Frank Ross, was an accomplished oil painter and he sparked further interest and excitement for art.

As a young adult, while Sharon lay sleeping with her father or a baby sitter keeping watch, I went to evening adult education classes in sketching the model, water color painting, and Chinese brush painting. Then I discovered clay! This was my first real foray into sculpture. I attended classes near home at a small studio run by a nurturing teacher and sculptor, Elayne Braun. It was here that I fell in love with the sensation of squishing clay in my hands and modeling it with my fingers and tools. My sculpting style was primarily semi-abstract and biomorphic, somewhat influenced by Elayne’s sculpture. I swirled various animals and figures into existence in a rhythmic and stylized manner. After a time, I was encouraged by Elayne to pursue sculpture as a serious activity. In the summer of 1973, while my mother took care of Sharon, I took art classes at the Instituto in San Miguel d’Allende, Mexico. There, I worked in wax and clay, and cast a portrait head into concrete and a sun image into bronze.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, in order to earn a living, I held a string of various jobs, such as Junior HS English teacher, Employment Interviewer at a State Agency, Employment Manager at a hospital and then Personnel Director at another hospital, dispatcher at a bicycle messenger service, credit analyst, and special education teacher. The most unusual job was driving a horse & carriage in Central Park, a gig Sharon, then nine years old, begged me to take. She inherited my passion for horses, and she went in the afternoons after school to hang out with them and the drivers. I broke the gender barrier and also broke my elbow when I fell from my perch in the carriage after an unfortunate collision with a car, thus ending that career.

In the mid-70s, I enrolled in design and sculpture classes at Hunter College and Empire State College. After accumulating sufficient credits, I applied for and was accepted into the two-year MFA program at City College, which I attended from 1977-79. There, I concentrated on clay sculpture and ceramics and learned to weld. Welding steel was exciting, and I fell under its spell. For many years after graduating, I worked almost exclusively on welded sculpture. I created in two main modes: using found objects, I made semi-realistic pieces, often in the form of masks or figures, and some were whimsical; and I did geometric wave pieces, using curved triangles. These waves were directly inspired by my childhood ocean experiences and the logic of geometry, which I had liked since high school.

After City College, during the 1980s and 90s, I welded evenings at the Educational Alliance Art School (Edgies) and soon became a class monitor. All this time I held a full-time job as a management planner at the Human Resources Administration, a NYC agency. In around 2000, Edgies closed for renovations, and I switched to studying at the Sculpture Center and then at Art Students League (ASL). There I returned to clay sculpting , this time from the model, something I had wanted to do for a long time, just to try it out. That trial lasted for about 15 years, and I completed over a hundred figurative sculptures in clay that I fired in a kiln or cast into plaster or other materials; some were life-size. In 2003, after I retired from my management planning job, I became an Instructor for Metal Sculpture at ASL, a position I held for 20 years.

While at Edgies, in 1980 about thirty students formed the Sculptors Alliance. We held exhibitions every year at galleries and alternative spaces. In the early 2000s we became incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. I was president for 15 years and led the group to provide free sculpture classes for the lower Manhattan community as well as hold exhibitions. For three summers, 2015-17, I applied for and we were assigned a house at Governors Island where we held sculpture workshops and exhibitions.

Concurrently, I joined the New York Society of Women Artists in 1996 and served at first as Treasurer for about six years and later as President for four years (2011-2015). Other affiliations include the Art Alumni of City College, where I have served as Treasurer since the mists of time, and the Arts Society of Kingston, NY (ASK). In 1987, my husband, George, and I bought a house in the Hudson Valley/Catskills area, where I am fortunate to have a studio that provides the space and equipment to work in clay, welded metal, and to collect lots of found objects. I split my time between upstate and the City.

As a solo exhibitor and with groups, I have shown in dozens of venues and have also curated several shows. Some of the main places include: galleries at Queens College, City College, Long Island University, Pace University, Iona College (Westchester); Harford Community College (MD), Middlesex Community College (NJ), Rhode Island University (Providence), and New Paltz College (NY); ASK Gallery; Soho and Chelsea galleries; the Hammond Museum (North Salem, NY); Sullivan Museum (Hurleyville, NY); Ashtabula Art Gallery (Ohio); corporate galleries and banks; Ellenville (NY), Greenwich (CT), and NYC Public Libraries; Sculpture Biennial in Kingston NY; the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery at Art Students League; and at two galleries in Spain (in Alicante and Madrid).

Highlights of my art career are my public sculpture, Wave, permanently installed at the Rockland Community College in Suffern, NY, and another public sculpture, Rockaway Wave, which was part of a sculpture walk in Rockaway Beach Park, Queens. Two smaller sculptures, Wave with Striped Bass and Rockway Wave Model are on permanent display in the Ruppert Condominium Towers lobbies in NYC.

I received a merit scholarship from ASL (Art Students League) and several awards for sculpture, but I am perhaps proudest of the Career Achievement award received from the Art Alumni of City College. As time goes on, I hope to sculpt forever.

A.S. – December 2023