“…[Pundyk’s] work suggests that understanding requires another interpretive tool, or perhaps a personal surrender to a deeper, less accessible, level of cognition.”

Helen A. Harrison, Curator
“Ten Artists” Catalogue
Guild Hall Museum

Born in Manhattan, I spent much of my childhood moving between the two coasts, but it is the impact of my parent’s deep mid-Western roots that recur throughout my work. I learned to read the mesmerizing gaze of heirloom chairs and cups from my mother. From my activist father, I grasped the importance of defending the urge to know one’s own identity, even when it is socially unacceptable to do so. I am settled now, painting and raising my own family in Manhattan with my writer husband, Jeff, and my most valued creations, my children Phoebe and Evan.  Through my family I have come to understand that painting is a self-defining stance.

My earliest exposure to artistic commitment came from my grandmother, artist Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, who studied with members of the Ashcan School at the Art Student’s league in the early 1900’s. My own formal studies of art began at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington DC and continued later at the Sorbonne University in Paris. I received a BA in Fine art from Pomona College in Claremont, CA, winning the Mary Drew Art Award, and completed an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

An artwork, I posit, has the potential to express a complete world, if undertaken fearlessly. One can feel in the work the concept of the body as a key for translating core ideas of identity. The communion between artist, subject and audience spins off of a series of linked moments of recognition, pairing imagination and understanding. 

My work has been shown nationally and is included in private collections here and abroad, including those of television journalist Katie Couric, New York, NY; Anthony Grant, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art, Rye, NY; and Cy Twombly, Rome Italy; and in corporate and institutional collections including those of Barclay’s Bank, New York, NY; State Street Bank, Boston, MA; Glamorise Foundations, New York, NY; St. Barnabas Medical Center Foundation, West Orange, NY; and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 

Recent exhibitions include Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Queens College Art Center, New York, NY; Fordham University, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; Susan Eley Fine Art, New York; NY, Art Miami, Miami, FL; The Philoctetes Center, New York; NY; ASYL Gallery, New York, NY; DFN Gallery, New York, NY; Elaine Benson Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY; Forest Scott Gallery, Millburn, NJ; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton; Nichols Gallery, Barboursville, VA; Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto, CA; The Grand Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas, NV; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; and Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA. 

I have lectured on my art in New York City at Fordham University, to students from Manhattan Marymount College and Sotheby's Art Institute; and at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA.  In April 2011, my painting-based video, “My Atlas: Lindsay/A Report to An Academy,” was given the Bronze Award at Artillery Magazine’s Open Call Screening at The Standard Hotel, Hollywood, CA.

I publish an artblog and write for the Brooklyn Rail.