The drawing depicts a woman in a red Alexander Wang dress and blue prison socks. A thought bubble next to her reads: “Send bitcoin.” The chair in which she sits has “Wanted” written on its back.
The woman is Anna Sorokin – the notorious fake German heiress whose scams of high society were exposed in a Vanity Fair article and then turned into the hit Netflix drama Inventing Anna – and the drawing is part of a group art show in a Lower East Side museum that showcases her work. Kind of.
Until the end of March, the show – Free Anna Delvey, a reference to the faux heiress’s preferred surname – is displaying drawings and other artworks, mostly by 33 artists who claim to have been “inspired” by Sorokin’s story.
It also includes five of Sorokin’s own 22x30in pencil and acrylic drawings, made while she was in jail – though, as so often in the past with Sorokin, that’s not quite true, given that the drawings were in fact reproduced on large-print watercolor paper by Alfred Martinez, the show’s co-curator.
“If she’s gonna get someone to copy her artwork, it’s good she got a Basquiat forger to do it,” Martinez told Insider, referencing the fact that in the early 2000s he spent two years in jail for selling Basquiat paintings he’d forged.
Julia Morrison, the show’s other co-curator, told the New York Times that she initially discovered Sorokin’s drawings while browsing Instagram. “No one is just a villain, or just a hero,” said Morrison, an artist whose own claim to infamy is minting NFTs of screenshotted messages of sex slavery and cannibalism that she said the actor Armie Hammer had sent her.
Morrison said she identified closely with Sorokin’s story because her own mother had served time in an immigration detention facility. Sorokin is being detained by Ice after completing a four-year prison sentence for second-degree grand larceny, theft of services and first-degree attempted grand larceny.
The Netflix documentary, which depicts Sorokin’s rise and fall as a con artist in New York City, did not apparently meet with Sorokin’s approval despite reports she was paid six figures to consult on the show. “That superglam portrayal of me in the Netflix series is not that accurate,” she told the New York Times, adding that she wanted the Free Anna Delvey art show – which she helped coordinate and produce from her detention cell – to give the public a look into “her side of the story”, as Martinez told Forbes.
“Art is only partly about talent and determination and even more so about the artist’s ability to demand attention through their personality and story. And this is where she really shines,” he said.
Anna’s reproduced sketches are priced at $10,000 each. She claims that 15% of the sale price of one of the drawings will be donated to a children’s charity. According to Martinez, 25% of the show’s proceeds will go towards Sorokin’s legal defense.
Sorokin’s legal team is fighting her deportation. Earlier this month, her lawyer filed a last-minute appeal to immigration authorities, hours before she was scheduled to be deported to Germany, citing “serious health issues”. Sorokin was granted emergency consideration.
She has since sued ICE, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claiming she caught Covid-19 while in detention after Ice officials allegedly denied her requests for a vaccine booster shot.
