“The woods speaks… and I listen.” –Nancy Azara
This weekend we gather at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild to honor the life, art and legacy of Nancy Azara—a visionary sculptor, feminist mystic and educator. This memorial celebration will feature a curated exhibition of Nancy’s carved wood sculptures, mixed media collages, banners, scrolls, and prints, alongside shared moments of remembrance, ritual, and reflection. In a moving continuation of their shared creative life, Darla Bjork, Nancy’s beloved partner of over forty years, will also present new work created after Nancy’s crossing. This memorial celebration will include a special performance by Go! Push Pops collective (Katie Cercone & Elisa Garcia de la Huerta) with Fanny Pérez Gutiérrez to honor Nancy—a dear friend, mentor, and inspiration. The live performance involves expressive movement and sound inspired by a reading of my essay “Nancy Azara: A Female Language of Divinity, Empathy and Loss,” a text included in Azara’s self-published book, coinciding with the opening of her VOTIVES exhibition at CBG Gallery in 2022.
In addition to Nancy’s work, the show also highlights her partner Darla Bjork’s recent body of paintings. A quiet yet potent presence in Azara’s life and community, Darla’s practice—like Nancy’s—is a testament to the intimate dance between art, spirit, grief, and transformation.
Nancy Azara’s life work defied dominant aesthetic frameworks and patriarchal lineage. Her creative lineage was elemental—drawn from tree and soil, body and myth, the unseen forces and the feminine divine. She offered us images not to consume but to commune with—works that asked: What lives beneath the surface? What needs to be remembered? What longs to be healed?
Born in Brooklyn to a Southern Italian family, Azara’s artistic path began with costume design at Finch College, later expanding into visual art through her studies with Edwin Dickinson and John Hovannes at the Art Students League of New York. This expanded her technical foundation, but it was the call of the unseen that shaped her path. She soon emerged as a trailblazing feminist voice, uninterested in conforming to the dominant aesthetic frameworks of her time.
In the 1970s, inspired by Yogic traditions and Zen philosophy, she turned inward, developing what she called “Visual Diaries”—an intuitive drawing practice that became a form of feminist consciousness-raising and soul-mapping. She later co-founded the New York Feminist Art Institute. For over a decade, NYFAI served as a sacred learning ground where art, feminism, and inner work were inseparable. She was also a founding influence in Ceres Gallery, a feminist non-profit gallery space, and an alumna member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery in the U.S. Her voice extended beyond sculpture, drawings, and collage. In her seminal book Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art (Red Wheel/Weiser), Azara offered a guide to reclaiming the act of creation as a form of listening—to the earth, to intuition, and the deep feminine.
Her artworks may be found in major institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, the Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts—though her deepest impact lives in the hearts and hands of those she mentored, taught, and walked beside. One of the most quietly radical aspects of Azara’s work was her commitment to restoring emotional and spiritual knowledge to its rightful place –alongside intellectual inquiry, women’s advancement, and earth stewardship. Until her later years, Azara hosted intergenerational feminist dialogues called (RE)PRESENT, led annual workshops, and offered her studios in Tribeca and Woodstock as sanctuaries for growth, resistance, and reclamation.
This memorial will be more than a look back—it will be a continuation of Nancy’s work: a collective act of grounding, remembering, and re-envisioning. In gathering together, we honor her belief that art, like nature, is not a product, but a process of becoming.
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 20th, 2025, 4-6pm
Memorial Gathering: Sunday, September 21st, 2025, 3-5pm
This event is free and open to the public at Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center for the Arts 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock, NY 12498
RSVP HERE
