Audrey Flack A’51

Audrey Flack holds a graduate degree and an honorary doctorate from The Cooper Union, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University where she was awarded a scholarship under Josef Albers.  She attended New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where she studied the history of art.

Audrey Flack has taught and lectured extensively both nationally, and internationally.  She taught at Pratt Institute from 1960 to 1968.  She has also taught at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, the National Academy of Design, and The Cooper Union.   She was an honorary professor at George Washington University, and  a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Audrey Flack is the recipient of the 1974 Award of Merit from the Butler Institute of American Art and the 1985 Artist of the Year Award from the New York City Teachers Association.  She was a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association of America from 1989 to 1994.  She has served as an Alumni Trustee of The Cooper Union since 2008.  She was awarded The Cooper Union Presidential Citation in 1977 and the Augustus Saint Gaudens Medal from The Cooper Union Alumni Association in 1983, and the honorary Albert Dorne professorship from Bridgeport University.  In 2009, she was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame.

She is a  pioneer of Photorealism and a nationally recognized painter and sculptor.  Ms. Flack’s work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of Art in Canberra, Australia.  She was the first photorealist painter to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.  Audrey Flack and Mary Cassat were the first women artists to be listed in Janson’s “History of Art” text.

In the early 1980s Audrey changed her primary artistic medium, from painting to sculpture. She produced a series of diverse, heroic women and goddess figures.  In the early 1990s she was commissioned to make a super large statue of Queen Catherine of Braganza (the founder of the New York borough of Queens) to stand opposite the United Nations.

In 2017, the Hollis Taggart Galleries will present a new body of work from Audrey Flack, highlighting her return to two dimensions after nearly three decades working almost exclusively in sculpture.  Learn More

Audrey Flack with Sculpture of Queen Catherine. Galenet Images

Throughout her career, Ms. Flack’s work has been featured in numerous traveling museum exhibitions, including “Twenty-two Realists” (1972) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Super Realism” (1975-76) at the Baltimore Museum of Art; “American Painting of the Seventies” (1979) at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Contemporary American Realism” (1981-83) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; “Toyama Now, 1981” (1981) at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; and “Making Their Mark:  Women Artists Move into the Mainstream”(1989) which traveled to the Cincinnati Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Ms. Flack has also held numerous solo exhibitions including at the Roko Gallery, New York; French & Company, New York; and the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, among others.

A major retrospective of her work organized by the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky has traveled to four museums around the country. Her work is currently being exhibited in museums throughout France, Italy and Japan.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS  (Partial listing)

• Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
• Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
• Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
• Stuart M. Speiser Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
• HHK Foundation for Contemporary Art, Inc., New York, New York
• Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
• San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco, California
• National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
• University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
• St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri
• Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, Texas
• University of Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona
• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina
• Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut
• Capricorn Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland
• Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio
• National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
• New York University Collections, New York, New York
• Reynolda House Museum, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Art Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, Virginia
• Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, Kentucky
• Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida
• Bulter Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
• The Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa Florida
• Flack’s Public Art Commissions are installed through out the United States

image from AtCooper

BOOKS AND ARTICLES BY AUDREY FLACK

• 1998-2015 Flack, Audrey. Art & Other Miracles – a Memoir
• 1992      Flack, Audrey. Sketchbook 1985-89. National Museum of Women in the Arts.
• 1989      Flack, Audrey. Audrey Flack—The Daily Muse, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, New York
• 1986      Flack, Audrey. Art and Soul, E.P. Dutton, New York, New York
• 1981      Flack, Audrey. Audrey Flack On Painting, with essay by Ann Sutherland Harris, and Introduction by Lawrence Alloway.      Harry N. Abrams, Inc., NY
• 1981      Flack, Audrey. “On Carlo Crivelli”, Arts Magazine, June
• 1978      Flack, Audrey. “Louisa Ignacia Roldan,” Women’s Studies, Vol. 6, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain; also published in Helicon Nine, 1979.

References:

Audrey Flack Website, Link

Morgan Robert C., AUDREY FLACK and the Revolution of Still Life Painting, The Brooklyn Rail 2010.

Swarns, Rachel L., An Artist With Too Many Ideas to Consider Retiring, New York Times, May 31, 2015    Link

Biography from Dictionary of Woman Artists (1997) Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.