Anne Sanger (b. 1970, US) is an artist and curator living in Upstate New York. She is also the founder of Pinkwater Gallery in Kingston, NY as well as a co-founder of Kingston Social, a café + mercantile + gallery. Her work incorporates striking color combinations and strong line, as influenced by her background in fashion as a designer and illustrator. Her development as an abstract artist has led her to explore pastel drawing, liquid acrylic works on paper as well as larger-scale acrylic and oil paintings. After a long career in the fashion industry, initially designing clothes before joining the dark side and designing technology, Anne returned to her artistic roots and began to paint.
As climate change went from a distant theory to current reality, she sought a way to cope by making art. Like many artists, she found that the only way to confront the sheer magnitude of the horror was to express it. Ironically, the art is happy… buoyant, even. If this is the end of the Anthropocene Epoch, her art seems to say: “So be it.” The Pinkwater series was born as a commentary on the collective responsibility all human beings share to ensure a habitable world for the next generation as well as our collective inaction and grief about the realities of climate change as it descends upon us.
After showing in numerous galleries around the Hudson Valley, Catskills and in New York City, Anne decided to open a gallery in the up-and-coming town of Kingston in Upstate New York. She christened it Pinkwater Gallery and inaugurated it with a show of the Pinkwater series paintings along with a new group entitled New World.
Pinkwater Gallery is now a proud standard-bearer of the best abstract female artists working in Upstate New York. A sophisticated array of local artists show work in the gallery on a rotating seasonal basis. The gallery has become a friendly place for visitors and locals alike to view and buy art directly from working artists. The concept à la maison situates the artwork in a homelike environment and strives to take the ‘art world’ out of the experience.
And Anne is a full-time, working artist as well as a curator and gallerist in the city of Kingston, NY. Balancing the solitude of art-making in the studio with the outward-facing life of interacting with customers at the gallery, Anne has finally found the creative life she had always hoped to live.
