Inside the opening of 'Free Anna Delvey,' the art show where the fake heiress hired a notorious art forger to recreate her prison drawings
- A new art gallery, "Free Anna Delvey," features five prison drawings from Anna Sorokin.
- She's still in jail, so she hired an art forger to recreate them in a large format.
"I'm a notorious art forger," is how Alfredo Martinez introduced himself. "Basquiat, mostly."
He is underselling himself. Martinez served a couple of years in prison in the early 2000s for a scam where he forged paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat. While incarcerated, he began taking art seriously on his own terms. One of his prison drawings, of a gun, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. In the two decades since he finished his own sentence, Martinez has become a fixture of New York's downtown art scene, curating dozens of gallery showings that connect big names and grittier, up-and-coming 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 noticed some of Sorokin's drawings from her stints in Riker's Island and Albion Correctional Facility, posted on her Instagram, and saw a promising young artist.
A year's worth of canceled plans and coordination from jail culminated Thursday night with "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 works of art are by Sorokin herself, recreated on large-print watercolor paper by Martinez.
"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 served as a launchpad for the gallery show, which runs until March 24 at 176 Delancey Street. In the 150-person throng, which spilled out into the outdoor backlot, a few familiar people from Sorokinworld made an appearance. Emily Palmer, the reporter who covered her trial for the New York Times, was there ("I think I'll include a few paragraphs about this in the next story, about her immigration issues," she said.) Todd Spodek, the criminal lawyer who defended her in her trial, depicted by Arian Moayed in Netflix's "Inventing Anna," also showed up. One man, who identified himself as a graffiti artist, approached him.
"Are you her lawyer? I need a lawyer," he said.
"What's your tag?" Spodek asked.
Spodek told Insider he's done 11 trials since Sorokin was convicted, in April 2019, for her scam where she pretended to be a fake heiress with a $60 million trust fund to bilk money from financial institutions so she could build a business called the Anna Delvey Foundation. None of those trials, he said, has received nearly as much attention. But for Sorokin, he said, he hoped the art show would prove that she can move her life forward.
"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!'
One person who did not make an appearance was, of course, Sorokin herself. While she finished her prison sentence in February 2021, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested her six weeks later and has kept her in jail since, claiming she hasn't been rehabilitated. Sorokin, a German national, has spent the past year fighting deportation and was nearly flown out earlier this week.
At around 9:15, Sorokin called Martinez's phone. His co-curator, Julia Morrison — who herself had a moment in the spotlight when she minted an NFT of screenshots of what she said were Instagram messages from Armie Hammer about sex slavery and cannibalism ("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 yelled.
Sorokin, alone in her jail cell, thanked the crowded room for their support.
"Free Anna Delvey! Free Anna Delvey!" the crowd chanted.
"Very happy and grateful for the grassroots support I've been getting from both young artists and the art world in general," Sorokin told Insider Friday morning. "Hope I'll be present in person for the next one."
Morrison told Insider she teamed up with Martinez to help Sorokin "pivot to the art world." They came up with the idea in February 2021, when Sorokin was freed from prison, of "a con artist turned artist helping another con artist make her way into the art world." But Sorokin ignored the Instagram DMs 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 story and got in touch. At first, Martinez and Morrison wanted to have Sorokin create an NFT for a gallery, subverting her reputation for forging financial documents, since NFTs are used for authentication. But when she was re-arrested, they pivoted. They obtained Sorokin's drawings, and Martinez, acting as her artist's assistant, recreated them.
The self-aware drawings joke about the media attention and thumb their nose at ICE and the prison she's been in. One depicts her at a command center called "JPay," the app she used to communicate to the outside world from Albion Correctional Facility. She's wearing Agent Provocateur and Alexander Wang paired with prison socks. She wants people to send her Bitcoin.
Why is Sorokin the one in jail?
Morrison had two pieces of her own work at the show. One is "Nothing to See Here: White House Toilet," a toilet filled with shredded documents meant to recreate "the White House toilet where former President Donald Trump flushed documents and other property belonging to the American public." She said she planned to fill it with pee and resin, then smash it with a sledgehammer this weekend. The other was "Manafort in a fort," of her pet hamster named Manafort in a cage lined with shredded pages of Paul Manafort's indictment.
Here was the message of "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 helped install pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. Sorokin took around $200,000 but paid it all back and served out her prison sentence. So why was she in jail and the others walking free?
"She paid her time. She paid restitution for all of her crimes," Morrison said. "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."
The gallery had another function too, Morrison and Martinez said. As an established artist, Sorokin could qualify for an O-1 artist visa, which could allow her to remain in the US.
Morrison's pieces weren't for sale, but the others at the gallery were. Sorokin's were priced at $10,000 apiece. On Friday morning, Morrison told Insider there was a single buyer interested in snapping up everything from the gallery, and that the costs were being negotiated.
Other works explored other aspects of Sorokin's personality. Noah Becker, the artist and magazine publisher, who told Insider he speaks to Sorokin multiple times a week, created a painting of graffiti-covered sculptures imposed on an impressionist landscape.
He described his painting as "post-art-world," said Becker, who recently recorded a podcast interview with Sorokin about her artistic interests. "The millennial to end all millennials."
Rina Oh Amen painted "Her Royal Highness Princess Annoushka (Anna Delvey) Louise of Savoy," which casts Sorokin as a royal surrounded by monarch butterflies and the imperial Russian crown atop her head.
The painting, Oh Amen said, evoked the imperious way Sorokin carries herself. As with Sorokin's sense of humor, it was steeped in irony.
"Usually, it's the other way around," she said. "Marie Antoinette did not care about the poor people. But Anna Delvey did not care about the rich people."
It was an apt metaphor. While the crowd celebrated her and jeered the people who got away with worse, Sorokin remained in jail. Her power, after all, was only on paper.