Wikipedia entry
Introduction
William Anastasi (b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1933) is an American visual artist working in a wide range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, photographic works, and text. He has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1960s and is known as "one of the most underrated conceptual artists of his generation".His first solo exhibition took place in 1964 at the Betty Parsons gallery following a chance meeting with Philip Guston who recommended his work to Parsons. Following this he had a number of exhibition at the Dwan Gallery from 1965 to 1970. In his early career, Anastasi was largely influenced by Marcel Duchamp, whose work he first saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art during his teens.His work is predominantly abstract and conceptual. Early works such as Relief (1961) and Issue (1966) incorporate the use of industrial and construction materials. His works are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2010 Anastasi was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award, an unrestricted grant awarded biennially. Currently exhibited works include "Nine Polaroid Photographs of a Mirror", currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2007, he took part in the artistic performance "Blind Date" at the White Box Gallery in New York. In the performance, he and fellow artist Lucio Pozzi both drew dozens of artistic pieces blindfolded in an 8 hour long artistic duel.In his early career, Anastasi was largely influenced by Marcel Duchamp, who inspired his shows at the Dwan Gallery from 1965 to 1970.Anastasi was a close friend of composer John Cage who he first met in 1965 when Cage heard that Anastasi was preparing an exhibition titled 'Sound Objects' and was interested in learning more. In 1977 Cage and Anastasi began playing chess daily Anastasi wrote the memoir The Cage Dialogues about their friendship.
Wikidata
Q15459073
View or edit the full Wikipedia entry
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Nationality
American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Installation Artist, Painter, Performance Artist, Photographer, Sculptor
Names
William Anastasi, Bill Anastasi
Ulan
500056778
View the full Getty record
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

15 works online

Exhibitions

View all 14 exhibitions

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].