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William Anastasi is an American Conceptual artist who was born in 1933. His birthdate places him exactly between Andy Warhol (b.1928) and Robert Smithson (b.1938). He is five years younger than Sol LeWitt (b.1928) and two years younger than Robert Morris (b.1931). Other artists active today who are about his age include John Baldessari (b.1931) and Hans Haacke (b.1936). Chronologically, in other words, he belongs to the first or classical generation of Conceptual artists. In terms of reputation or stature, however, Anastasi is not nearly as well known as the others named. This does not seem to be a consequence of the quality of the work. Rather a certain inability for markets, systems, and bureaucracies to deal with his frequently subversive work has caused him to be left out of the gallery system, and thus the art historical record, for many years. His work was fundamental to the formation of Conceptual Art. The incisiveness and accuracy of his intuition in the years when the thematics of Conceptualism were being worked out stand at the forefront of a canonical list of American names such as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Douglas Huebler. It is true that Conceptual Art was also happening in some other places at the time in question -- France, Japan, Brazil -- but it is the American or New York City-based canon that is relevant here. Anastasi's name is conspicuously lacking from that canon. There are numerous reasons contributing to this situation, not the least the fact that he has not made a significant amount of money for any gallery. The significance of an amount of money is that it causes an artist's gallerist to hire prominent critics to write about the work, and the writings of these critics then ensure the work's inclusion in the art history books. William Anastasi is a prime representative of conceptualism “not merely as an exponent of this kind of art but historically as one of the very inventors of the idiom itself in the 1960’s “(Richard Milazzo). Citing the weight carried by the precedence of Duchamp’s ‘Three Standard Stoppages’ and other chance derived work, he began a series of Blind Drawings in 1963, which lead to unsighted Subway Drawings in 1968, begun as an extension of his Pocket Drawings from the same period. In the late 70’s he reinvestigated the Subway Drawings riding to and from daily chess games with John Cage. Sitting with a pencil in each hand and a drawing board on his lap, his elbows at an angle of 90 degrees, his shoulders away from the back rest, Anastasi was operating as a seismograph, allowing the rhythm of the moving train - its starts, stops and turns, accelerations and decelerations, to be transformed into lines on paper. This signifies not only the internalization of chance in a work but furthermore the phenomenological process:...“it is an art object that expresses the physicality of its making.” (Pamela Lee) Anastasi demonstrates his concerns and reflections with the act of not seeing. In an 1990 interview about Anastasi’s modus operandi vis a vis Surrealism’s Automatism John Cage made a clear distinction:”It’s not psychological; it’s physical.” Anastasi surrenders to a random process, allowing deeper or more intricate structures to surface. The results are mysterious and highly subtle drawings, exposing another order, a timeless noncausal scenario of universal physiological conditions. William Anastasi's work is committed to the sublime, a condition where attraction and repulsion emerge simultaneously which can only be entirely admitted with the employment of cognitive dissidence - such an unreconciled awareness yields an enticingly complex emotional reaction. William Anastasi has exhibited his work in Europe, Asia and the United States both in private and public venues. His work is concurrently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in the exhibition ‘Afterimage: Drawing Through Process’. His work is also in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Whitney Museum in New York, The Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Jewish Museum New York, Staatsgalerie fur Kunst in Denmark, Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf in Germany to name but a few. His work is included in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States.