By Mike Hays
Annie Lombardi has built an ever-expanding personal community for art lovers on Instagram. Her IG account @umadesigns has almost 19,000+ followers since she started curating photographs of art 18 months ago. A single post has gotten as high as 20,351 likes.
She began curating artists to share her own experience of art with others. Her IG posts focus on a single artist with three shots on a single day. Sometimes she posts a second set of three on the same artist a day later. She covers painting, watercolors, street art and sculpture among many other art genres.
Annie’s triple post of the Transcendence Series by Gerald Ho
The IG posts are more than an archive of her interests; they are like going to an online museum. She discovers artists in a number of ways. Sometimes she finds art on Pinterest. She may not know the artists name, so she searches on Google Images to find the artist. She also discovers art on IG via people she follows. Artists and friends of artists come to her hoping she will post their art for more exposure.
A popular Instagram post from Annie of the work by artist Ted Lawson showing the artwork and part of the written description of the artist’s work
Each post includes a written description of the artist that adds depth and value to the visual. She researches the artists online, looking for the story behind each person’s art; how and where the art is created, and what it means. She adds between 3 and 20 hashtags to enable discovery of her posts.
For Annie the discovery of art is reward in itself but she also enjoys the online comments she receives from her art-loving, like-minded community.
Moving to Nyack
Annie has run her own advertising and graphic design firm, Universal Marketing LLC, for 27 years. When she is not working or posting on IG, you can find her in a kayak, rock climbing, hiking, teaching or practicing yoga, and helping at the charity garden at Marydell.
Annie’s six posts of Fused Portraits by digital photographer Antonio Mora
Annie enjoys the eclectic, artsy, accepting, and open community of Nyack. She has traveled a long way to get here. She grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. She left South Africa to work for Carl Zeiss in Germany in their marketing department. Zeiss is known for its lenses used in cameras, operating and electron microscopes, geodetics, and planetariums. She lived in Japan for one year while working for Zeiss and then came to the US working out of Zeiss’s Thornwood office. She found an ad for an apartment with a river view and has lived in Nyack ever since.
Photo Credit: Mike Hays
Michael Hays is a 30-year resident of the Nyacks. He grew up the son of a professor and nurse in Champaign, Illinois. He has recently retired from a long career in educational publishing with Prentice-Hall and McGraw-Hill. He is an avid cyclist, amateur historian and photographer, gardener, and dog walker. He has enjoyed more years than he cares to count with his beautiful companion, Bernie Richey. You can follow him on Instagram as UpperNyackMike.
Nyack People & Places features photos and profiles of citizens and scenes near Nyack, NY. Sponsored by the Gedney Street Project.
