Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce hillsdale, an installation of works by Allyson Strafella. This will be her first exhibition with the gallery and will take place in the Pocket Gallery at 179 10th Avenue. An artist reception will be held on September 11 from 6-8pm.
Allyson Strafella has been drawing with a typewriter since 1992. She began drawing out of the need to communicate; to find her own language. hillsdale is a collection of drawings that reflect Strafella’s view of her surrounding landscape in Columbia County, NY.
Using a typewriter as a drawing tool, Strafella builds up repetitive punctuation marks to create forms. Working with handmade pigmented paper provides a greater resource of color and scale; carbon and transfer paper are the primary medium used to imbed those marks into paper.
Writing with a typewriter, a mechanized tool to keep up with her thoughts, she employs no rules of the written language. Strafella has, “developed marks that are my visual language: a drawing language ‘written’ by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form.” The typed images hover between the abstracted familiar, and the intimately far-away. Through the practice of drawing, she aims to clarify the complexities of the world she lives in.
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.
