Maria Anasazi, a native of Greece is an artist and educator and works in sculpture, installation, and performance. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Anasazi has received the Maryland State Arts Council fellowship for sculpture and was awarded a 2-year career development fellowship with the Center for Visual Artists, in Philadelphia. Her work has been reviewed in Art Papers, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fiberarts magazine and Surface Design. Maria Anasazi received her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, her MA from San Francisco State University and she holds a certificate in Expressive Arts Therapy from JFK University, Orinda, California. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
Statement:
My work deals with issues of personal and collective loss, identity, and the body. Found objects such as discarded books provide a sense of home for me through their history while as I am re-telling my own story. I perceive books as having lives and bodies, as containers of memory. As a child, growing up in rural Greece, I did not have books of my own, as books had a monetary value that my family could not afford. Having missed out on fairy tales and stories allows me to take a certain distance from them as I hold them and touch them without reading their content. Folding, cutting and sewing pages has become my meditative process as I try to touch the past, a body to body experience, that allows me to enter their world.