Anna Sorokin hired an art forger to help with the ‘Free Anna Delvey Gallery Show’

• A new gallery of art “Free Anna Delvey,”Five prison drawings by Anna Sorokin are featured.
• Because she is still in jail, she hired an artist forger to reproduce them in large formats.
• The gallery is gaining grassroots support in order to get her into New York’s art scene.

“I’m a notorious art forger,”Alfredo Martinez introduced him. “Basquiat, mostly.”

He undersells himself. Martinez spent a few years in prison during the 2000s. He forged Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings in a scam. He took art seriously during his imprisonment. One of his prison drawings shows a gun. The Museum of Modern Art purchased it. In the twenty-years since his retirement, His own sentenceMartinez is an established fixture in New York’s downtown art scene. She curates numerous gallery shows that link up big names with gritter and emerging artists.

So when Anna Sorokin — also known as Anna Delvey — was released from prison in February of last year, Martinez knew he had to collaborate with her.

He found some of Sorokin’s drawings, from her stints on Riker’s Island, Albion Correctional Facility, on Instagram, and recognized a promising young talent.

Thursday night marked the culmination of a year’s worth canceled plans and coordinated from jail. “Free Anna Delvey,” a gallery showing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side — not far from the hotels Sorokin scammed — featuring around two-dozen artists riffing on the con artist. Five of the art pieces are by Sorokin herself. They were recreated by Martinez on large-print watercolor paper.

“If she’s gonna get someone to copy her artwork, it’s good she got a Basquiat forger to do it,” Martinez told Insider.

Thursday night’s opening was a platform for the gallery show which will continue until March 24th at 176 Delancey Street. A few Sorokinworld friends made an appearance in the crowd of 150 people that spilled onto the backlot. Emily Palmer, a reporter for the New York Times who covered her trial was also present.”I think I’ll include a few paragraphs about this in the next story, about her immigration issues,”She stated. Arian Moayed depicts Todd Spodek, the criminal attorney who defended her during her trial. “Inventing Anna,”Also, a man showed up. He was approached by a man who claimed to be a graffiti artist.

“Are you her lawyer? I need a lawyer,”He stated.

“What’s your tag?” Spodek asked.

Spodek said that he has been to 11 trials since Sorokin’s April 2019 conviction. This was for the scam in which she pretended she was a fake heiress and had a $60 million trust account to bilk financial institutions to build her business, the Anna Delvey Foundation. Spodek said none of the trials have received as much attention. He said that Sorokin hoped the art exhibition would show her that she could move forward in her life.

“What I want for Anna is for the trial and the tribulations of the past to be one chapter in a multi-chapter book about her life,”He told Insider. “It’s time to move past that. She’s created wonderful art. People are here to celebrate her and that’s what’s important.”

Chants of “Free Anna Delvey!”

Sorokin was the only person who didn’t make it to the event. Six weeks after she was released from prison, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested her and has kept her there ever since. They claim she has not been rehabilitated. German national Sorokin has been fighting deportation for the past year and was almost flown out this week.

Martinez was contacted by Sorokin at 9:15. His co-curator, Julia Morrison — who herself had a moment in the spotlight when she minted an NFT of screenshots of What she said was Armie Hammer’s Instagram messagesInformation about cannibalism and sex slave labor”Dibs on the glute muscles and ribs for smoking,” Hammer appeared to have said in the messages; he’s denied wrongdoing) — told the rest of the room to “shut the fuck up.”

“We’re paying $1,000 for this phone call,”Morrison shouted.

Sorokin was alone in her prison cell and thanked everyone for their support.

“Free Anna Delvey! Free Anna Delvey!”The crowd cheered.

“Very happy and grateful for the grassroots support I’ve been getting from both young artists and the art world in general,”Sorokin spoke to Insider Friday morning. “Hope I’ll be present in person for the next one.”

Morrison shared with Insider her partnership with Martinez to help Sorokin “pivot to the art world.”The idea was first proposed by the two men in February 2021 when Sorokin was released from prison. “a con artist turned artist helping another con artist make her way into the art world.”Sorokin, however, ignored the Instagram DMs that they sent.

“It was impossible to get ahold of her,” Martinez said. “So what I did was, I planted some story in Page Six to get her attention.”

Sorokin saw The storyI got in touch. Martinez and Morrison wanted Sorokin’s NFT to be used as authentication. After she was re-arrested they changed their minds. Martinez was her assistant and helped Sorokin draw the drawings.

One of her self-aware drawings makes fun of the media attention, while the other thumbs down at ICE. One shows her in a command center called “JPay,”The app she used for communication with the outside world from Albion Correctional Facility. She’s wearing Agent Provocateur, Alexander Wang, paired with prison socks. She would like people to send her bitcoin.

Why is Sorokin the one who is in jail?

Morrison had two pieces by herself at the exhibition. One is “Nothing to See Here: White House Toilet,”Toilet filled with shredded documents, meant to recreate the White House toilet that former President Donald Trump used Flushed documentsProperty belonging to the American public. She stated that she would fill it with pee, resin, and then smash it with a stick this weekend. The other was “Manafort in a fort,”Manafort, her pet hamster, was placed in a cage with the shredded pages from Paul Manafort’s indictment.

Here was the message “Free Anna Delvey,” Morrison said: Trump took 15 boxes of classified documents home with him to Mar-a-Lago — not to mention all the other stuff. Paul Manafort assisted in installing pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to Ukraine. Sorokin was able to pay back $200,000 and completed her sentence. Why was she in prison and not the other prisoners?

“She paid her time. She paid restitution for all of her crimes,”Morrison stated. “There are many men who have done the same thing that she’s done, but they have connections, influence, power, and fancy names. And they never see the inside of a day of court because of it.”

Morrison, Martinez and others stated that the gallery also served another purpose. Sorokin, an established artist could be eligible for this award. an O-1 artist visaThis could enable her to stay in the US.

Morrison’s art wasn’t up for sale. But, the other pieces in the gallery were. Sorokin’s pieces were listed at $10,000 per piece. Morrison stated to Insider that there was only one buyer interested in purchasing everything in the gallery on Friday morning and that negotiations were ongoing.

Others explored different aspects of Sorokin’s personality. Noah Becker (the artist and publisher of Insider) created a painting that depicts graffiti-covered sculptures placed on an impressionist landscape.

His painting was described by him as “post-art-world,”Becker said, “Who are you?” Recently, Sorokin recorded a podcast interview about her artistic interests. “The millennial to end all millennials.”

Rina Oh Amen was painted “Her Royal Highness Princess Annoushka (Anna Delvey) Louise of Savoy,”Sorokin is depicted as a queen surrounded with monarch butterflies and the imperial Russian crown on her head.

Oh Amen stated that the painting evoked Sorokin’s imperious style. It was full of irony, just like Sorokin’s senses of humor.

“Usually, it’s the other way around,”She spoke. “Marie Antoinette did not care about the poor people. But Anna Delvey did not care about the rich people.”

It was a very fitting metaphor. While her supporters cheered her on and mocked those who did worse, Sorokin was still in prison. Even though she had power on paper, it was not real.