Allyson Strafella has created drawings on hand-made paper with a typewriter since 1992. She began this practice out of a pressing need to communicate in a language all her own. The typewriter, paired with carbon and transfer paper and intensely colored inks, is her tool.
Working keystroke by keystroke on hand-made paper, Strafella builds repetitive marks into minimal, saturated abstract shapes. Some echo the hilly terrain of her Columbia County home, and some are totally abstract. All of them carry the intense physicality of her process. Even as constant pounding starts to wear and shred, the drawings maintain the obstinate physical record of pent-up energy.
Does Strafella type out her deepest thoughts to create these forms or does the rhythmic sound of typing create an abstract dance? The forms can be the result of be either or both or something in between.
Allyson Strafella received her BFA from The Museum School of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 1993. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Strafella’s work is in both private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; The Hammer Museum, CA; The Morgan Library & Museum, NY; Yale Art Museum, CT; The Fogg Art Museum, MA; The Walker Center, MN amongst several others. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1999, 2025), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002), Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2017), Sustainable Arts Foundation (2017), Artists Resource Trust (2017), New York Foundation for the Arts (2001, 2011), The Martha Boschen Porter Fund (2015). She lives and works in Hudson, New York. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, with two locations in New York City.