Anastasia Pelias was born in New Orleans, LA to a Greek immigrant mother and a first generation Greek-American father. She received her BFA from the Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1981, and her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1996. Pelias has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums nationwide, and has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, ArtDaily, Pelican Bomb and New Orleans Art Review. Her work appears in the permanent collections at the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, and in private and public collections worldwide.

Pelias’ work has been featured in notable exhibitions including The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2018, and Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana at Newcomb Art Museum in 2019 and at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2020. In 2018, Pelias was commissioned by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX to to make a site-specific sculpture and painting installation. In 2020 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Residency. Pelias is a selected artist in the Prospect.5 Triennial, 2021-22.

Artist Statement

In my studio practice I unapologetically embrace subjects of love, sex, death, destiny, and the human experience–in particular the female experience. The dual cultural identity of both my native and ancestral roots in New Orleans, LA and Skopelos, Greece profoundly inform my work. Greek rituals and ideas about fate and destiny as well as the rich pageantry of the Afro-Caribbean culture in New Orleans are major influencing factors in my work. I am interested in deep ancestral connections that are ever-present, that resonate even if they are not always understood.

I embrace a process that is both intuitive and intentional. While I am working, I enter a space where I avoid conscious thought. I am drawn to content and meaning, abstraction and gesture, and the materiality of paint. Color and its emotional power is a critical component in all of my work.

I am an interdisciplinary artist – my bodies of work include oil paintings on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, video and multi-dimensional site-specific and site-responsive installations. The human-size scale of my interactions with diverse media allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the work as opposed to simply being an observer. I consider all of my work to be painting, even though it may not look like painting. I believe in the power of painting and its ability to evoke a visceral response from the viewer, and to change how people see the world. I want to create work that is full of emotion and visual pleasure.