Anne Stanner

Biography

Anne Stanner is a sculptor, curator, educator, and administrator. She was born and spent the first twent-seven years of her life in Queens, NY. Some time after graduating with a Master of Fine Ars degree from The City College of NY, she received a merit schoarship to study at the Art Students League of NY. She became a member of the metal sculpture faculty there from 2003 to 2023. She is a founding member of Sculptors Alliance, a not-for-profit organization that promotes sculpture as an art form, of which she was president 2004-2019. She is a member and past president of the New York Society of Women Artists, and a member and treasurer of the CCNY Art Alumni group.

Childhood experiences with art presage Anne's later career as an artist. She built and glued small towers out of shells she had collected at the beach. In elementary school she loved making 3D relief posters for social studies class. She won a contest at the local library for a colorful drawing of a woman wearing a facy dress. Anne's mother was an amateur oil painter and to Anne's delight let her use her oil paints, brushes, and canvas board to create paintings. In junior high school, Anne became best friends with a girl whose father was a semi-professional oil painter. Anne loved his portraits and landscapes in the post-imressionist style of Cezanne. This may have been the beginning of an urge to seriously pursue visual art, though that pursuit was delayed many years. In her early-twenties, having married, had a baby girl, and finished a BA in English at Queens College, she started taking a class at a small clay sculpture studio near her home in Flushing, Queens, where she really began to discover and develop her creativity with sculpture. The wonderful instructor encouraged her to pursue sculpture as a career, and after studying art at additional art schools, she eventually enrolled in the MFA program at the City College of NY, with a concentration in sculpture. She received her degree in 1979 at a time when she was divorced, raising a daughter as a single parent, and working part-time for New York City as a substitute teacher in Special Ed and as an Adult Ed administrator.

As a sculptor, Anne uses her love both for geometry and for organic form. She works in a variety of mediums including metal, clay, wax, bronze, plaster, stone, and mixed media, utilizing sculptural methods of welding, modeling, carving, casting, and assembling. Her sculptures emerge in the form of human figures, semi-abstract geometry such as waves, whimsical assemblage from found objects, masks, dogs and horses, and hearts. The ocean has had a strong influence on Stanner. As a child and teenager, she often swam at Atlantic Ocean beaches. Feeling the immense power of the waves, yet the calming effect of floating on them, and experiencing the ebb and flow, the rhythm of nature, led her to recreate this in her sculpture, though in a stylized and geometric manner. One of these sculptures, Wave, was chosen to be exhibited in Riverside Park in New York City as one of seven works in the 2012-13 Model to Monument program (a collaboration between the Art Studets League and the NYC Parks Department). It is now a permanent installation on the campus of Rockland Community College in Suffern, NY. Her public sculpture, Rockaway Wave. was on view in 2017 at Rockaway Beach Park in Queens, NY. (Photos of these two pieces can be seen in the Public Art album of her portfolio.)

Artist statement

In my artistic practice, I have gone down many paths and explored multiple materials, techniques and forms, variously abstract, semi-abstract, geometric, and realistic. One overarching theme has been ocean waves, about which I am passionate. For me, sculpting is a totally immersive and holistic experience, involving my hands, heart, and mind. While pursuing this for myself, I also want to communicate to others a feeling, an idea, a sense of volume in space, and universal rhythms. Since childhood, I have had a fascination with art, especially 3D art. I like the fact that it occupies space, its "thereness".

In my early twenties, I began sculpting in clay, creating biomorphic, semi-abstract forms, mainly of animals. I  moved on to stone carving for a few years, sculpting abstracts, figures, and portraits. Then I turned to welding metal, mainly sheet steel and found objects, a practice which I continue today. The sheet steel pieces are mostly geometric, utilising curved triangles to create wave-like forms. The found object pieces are often whimsical, consisting of semi-abstract figures and masks. I like recycling, or "upcycling" metal detritis, helping to make good use of the trash we see around us. Concurrently with welding, I returned to clay -- with a focus on modeling the human figure in a classical, naturalistic mode from the model -- for several more years. I have liked the study of human anatomy, structure, form, and movement, and expressing this in sculpture.

Now I consider my primary, but not exclusive, medium to be metal welding, and I find myself coming back to wave forms. With these wave forms, I hope my sculptures inspire viewers to contemplate and experience the ocean in a positive way and to achieve a deeper understanding of nature and the natutral forces that surround us. I am also deeply concerned about the earth's environmental crisis, with global warming and pollution of air, land and water, especially plastics in the ocean that contaminate sea life and our own bodies. I have begun to create artworks reflecting this concern.