Anna Park (artist)

Anna Park (born July 26, 1996, Daegu, South Korea) is a Korean-American visual artist working primarily on large-scale charcoal drawings. She was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and now is now based in Brooklyn, New York.

Early life and education
Anna Park was born in South Korea in 1996, and relocated to the United States with her family at a young age. Her family lived in California for a brief period before settling in Salt Lake City. Park is the offspring of a pharmacist mother, who incentivized her interest in the arts with after-school art classes.

Park holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She has completed a Certificate of Fine Arts program at New York Academy of Art after transferring from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

Work
Anna Park's artistic practice is developed through painting and charcoal drawings. Her large-scale artworks, play a role between figuration and abstraction, and often depict emotionally-charged scenes of joy and chaos, greed and celebration, life and death.

In 2019, while in graduate school Anna Park's work impressed American pop artist and toy designer Kaws, at a New York Academy of Arts event, who supported her practice by sharing her work in his social media account attracting large public attention to her work.

Exhibitions and collections
The Drawing Center in New York presented her work in 2020, as part of the group exhibition 100 Drawings from Now. Her first solo show in Europe was presented at T293 Gallery in Rome, Italy.

She have had one-person showings in venues in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo between 2021 and 2022. In 2021, her signature charcoal drawings were acquired by at least four major United States museums. They are High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

Her work was featured in group shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022; the exhibition 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; and the Art on the Grid at Public Art Fund, New York; among others.

In 2023, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, exhibited her major institutional solo show yet. Last Call expanded on her signature large-scale charcoal compositions presenting shades of black, gray and white tonalities. Works Now You See Me, Last Call, and Free Fall, all from 2021, were included in the show.

Awards and recognition
Anna Park is the First Prize winner of the AXA Art Prize in 2019; and the Grand Prize winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty, also in 2019.