Methods of Art – Archive of Artists Interviews

Why I am doing art? Oh I don’t know it’s such a series of different things. One I could say is that I had
no choice, I was so compelled to do it. Or I could say that it gives me wisdom, which is really what I
think is a major thing, because the more I make art the more wisdom I get and the more connected
I feel to whatever it is inside its all of us its connected and makes me feel, makes me take a place in
the world, that I don’t think I would feel I had if I didn’t make art. And it also makes me understand
other people, in a way I don’t I would understand if I didn’t make art. It’s was like an empathy and a
compassion and a dialogue with other people that happens. It’s an internal dialogue but its there.
I wanted to have a dynamic. I don’t wanted people to look at and go: oh…you know. Even if they
dislike it I want them to have a feeling about it. Often when I myself dislike work, I go back to it, as I
was saying that younger generations art, I’ll go back to it in my mind and think about and sometimes
I like it better. So I’d like all those things to happen. I really like people to interchange with the work.

Nancy Azara / Intention

Bio

* New York, lives and works in TriBeCA section of Manhattan. Nancy Azara’s sculpture is carved and painted wood, often with gold and silver/ aluminum leaf and encaustic. Azara’s Collage/Scrolls include large rubbings, tracings and painted cutouts on Mylar scrolls. The wood, the paint, the layers that make up the sculpture and collage/scrolls record a journey of images and ideas from within memory, often using leaves, hand prints and tracings and rubbings as a metaphor. Azara recently exhibited her work in one person exhibitions: I am the Vine, You are the Branches at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn Heights, NY; Of leaves and vines… A shifting braid of lines at SACI Gallery in Florence, Italy and in group exhibitions: Allegory of Leaves at New Jersey State University; Atwater Art Gallery in Rhinebeck, NY; Pseudo Empire, Brooklyn, NY; Gallery Sensei, NYC; Scripps College in Claremont, CA and at the Asya Geisberg Gallery in Chelsea, NY. Earlier one woman exhibitions: Donahue/Sosinski Art, the Andre Zarre and A.I.R. Galleries in New York City, the Froelick Gallery, Portland, Oregon, the Tweed Museum in Duluth, Minnesota, Rudolph E. Lee Gallery in Clemson, N.C., the Gwinnett Fine Arts Center in Duluth, Georgia and group shows such as the traveling Rutger’s University exhibition, How American Women Artists Invented Post-Modernism. She was the featured sculptor at the SANYI Museum, NANCY AZARA in Taiwan in 2008.

http://www.nancyazara.com

Credits

The interview was conducted on March 4 2015 at the artist’s studio in New York.

Interviewed by: Johannes M. Hedinger

Filmed and recorded by: Konstanze Schuetze

Edited by: Paul Barsch

Transcript by: Wolfram Eggebrecht, Lea Hoßbach, Ella Tetrault

Produced by: University of Cologne (Cologne), Institut für Kunst&Kunsttheorie