Anne Sherwood Pundyk is an artist and writer based in Manhattan and Mattituck, NY. She is a painter who brings together the traditions of abstract art, textiles and storytelling. Anne has recently explored the impact of generational trauma on her work through independent research at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO.

Anne has engaged in art making, exhibiting and art writing over the last 35 years. She relocated her studio to the North Fork twelve years ago. The move has been the catalyst for a fundamental re-centering of her art. She now adapts everyday materials with an eye toward questioning convention. Curator Helen A. Harrison observed, “…[Anne’s] work suggests that understanding requires another interpretive tool, or perhaps a personal surrender to a deeper, less accessible, level of cognition.”

Her work is currently included in a group exhibition, “Pierogi Gallery Flat Files on the Road,” Mana Center, Jersey City, NY. After creating work at a printmaking residency in Austin, TX, Anne showed the new prints in a solo exhibition, “Getting Lost on Purpose,” in Greenport, NY in March 2026. Anne showed her paintings in a two-person exhibition, “Unbound,” at Art Access Gallery, Columbus, OH in spring 2025. Other solo exhibitions include East End Arts, Riverhead, NY; TheBrownStoneArt, Brooklyn, NY; Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY; Adah Rose Gallery, Kensington, MD; Queens College Art Center, Queens, NY; and Susan Eley Fine Art, New York, NY. Selected group shows include The Works Museum, Newark, OH; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY; VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY; Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY, The University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT; and Art Access, Columbus, OH.

Anne's work has been acquired by Cy Twombly, Anthony Grant and Katie Couric among others. Institutional collections with her work include Baylor University, Waco, TX; Barclays Bank, New York, NY; Denison University, Granville, OH; Equity Residential, New York, NY; Franklin Furnace, Brooklyn, NY; Glamorise Foundations, New York, NY; Luciano Benetton Foundation, Milan, Italy; Marriott International, Inc., Jersey City, NJ; State Street Bank, Boston, MA; St. Barnabas Medical Center Foundation, West Orange, NJ; The New School for Social Research, New York, NY; Piccolo Museo del Diario, Pieve Santo Stefano, Italy; The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; and The University of California, Irvine, CA.

Her work has been reviewed in The East End Beacon, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Washington Post, among other publications.

STATEMENT

INTEGRATION OF COLOR

I experimented with ways of bringing my painting aesthetic to monoprinting during my residency at The Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin last December. Months later, back in my studio, the rigor and patience I learned at Flatbed has compelled me to take stock of and evolve my approach to painting.

This was helped by being welcomed back to New York with an invitation by artist Rainer Gross to show the new prints with my paintings in March in a show fittingly called “Getting Lost on Purpose.” He wrote, “Anne’s printing process has the uncanny ability to fuse layers into a fascinating flatness where only the pigmented overlapping color tones create dimensions of depth and space. These prints, based on years of studio experimentation, are a rare culmination in the evolution of Anne’s work. They stand on their own.”

As an interlude after printmaking and before getting back to painting, I worked on simple, small scale abstract colored pencil drawings inspired by the overlaying of colors I love in the prints. Since March, I've used the drawings as the basis for my new paintings connecting them to the prints. Looking back, it’s clear that engaging with a new medium is more than a superficial technical exercise. You have to step outside yourself and ask for help while simultaneously channeling what is core to your being.

NAVIGATING HIDDEN REALMS

For the last 12 years I have honed my own technique to create large-scale, multi-colored, abstract paintings on stained, cropped and stitched, unstretched canvas that have irregular surfaces supporting layers of paint.

I work that way, I’ve come to understand, in response to formative experiences with family secrets and denials. Curator Dylan Greif recently wrote about my process, “Anne’s abstract paintings are crafted from the very mechanics of concealment — canvas cropped, stained, stitched, buried under paint, and partially surfaced. Her work is a natural embodiment of the process of hiding, but with a crucial distinction: it focuses less on relaying what is hidden and more on the unfolding and inner-wrestling of hiding itself.”

He observed, about my newest work, “Recently, however, Anne’s expertise navigating hidden realms now allows her to choose for herself what she wants to hide and what she wants to say. After a lifetime of learning the craft of hiding, she is testing what it means to choose, deliberately, to reveal.”