NANCY  AZARA

Nancy Azara was an artist and feminist educator best known for her large-scale wood sculptures and mixed media collages. Nancy developed 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 explored life cycles, utilizing the metaphor of tree for personhood. Egg tempera, often in reds and pinks, and aluminum, palladium, gold gilding recover these exposed layers, exploring folkloric stories of women’s roles, goddess imagery, ancient symbols, mystic spiritual traditions and affirmation of female self.

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Nancy made and exhibited work from her studios in Tribeca and Woodstock. She was constantly challenging herself and her community in quarterly intergenerational feminist dialogues, (RE)PRESENT, 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.