BIOGRAPHY

Anne Stanner is a sculptor, curator, educator, and administrator. After graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree from The City College of NY, she received a merit scholarship to study at the Art Students League of NY. She has been a member of the metal sculpture faculty there since 2003. 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-to 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 fancy 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’s best friend’s father was a semi-professional oil painter. Anne loved his portraits and landscapes in the post-impressionist 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 mid-twenties, having married, had a baby girl, and finished a BA in English at Queens College, she began attending a class at a small clay sculpture studio. The instructor encouraged her to pursue sculpture as a career, and she 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 an Adult Ed administrator.

As a sculptor, Anne uses her love both for geometry and for free 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 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 and is now a permanent installation at Rockland Community College in Suffern, NY. Her public sculpture, Rockaway Wave, was on view from May to October 2017 at Rockaway Beach Park in Queens, NY. (Photos of these two pieces can be seen in the public art section of this website.)