Crime is finally paying off for Anna Delvey with a potential new career as a legitimate artist –- selling sketches at $10,000 each.
The wannabe socialite scammer — who ripped off friends and tried to con her way into bank loans while climbing New York’s social ladder — wanted to open up an arts club, but is now settling on being an artist herself.
Following interest in a “Free Anna Delvey” group art show that drew attention last week on the Lower East Side — which included five of her drawings — we’re told Delvey, née Sorokin, is working on a debut solo show.
Chris Martine, who is handling art sales for Delvey, tells us, “the solo show will be more guest list focused with a celebrity clientele as opposed to the grittier group show.”
As Delvey would say, “So VIP.”
Martine tells us her original pieces will be shown during the upcoming solo show, and will be priced around $10,000.
“We were able to get in paper that is 9 x 12 inches,” he says of her supplies in lock up, as she is currently being held at an ICE detention center in Goshen, New York.
While plans are still being finalized, Martine says he’s hoping to have 20 works by next week in order to get everything ready for an April show.
Delvey is currently being held in an ICE detention center.theannadelvey/Instagram“A lot of times artwork is more than the visual element, but the story behind it which is what people really buy,” Martine tells us. “If you look at her sketches, she has legitimate talent.”
He added, “So many people are so fascinated by what happened, and the amount of attention she is getting. It’s a way for her to voice her story in a way that is permanent.”
We’re told that since Delvey sold the rights to her story to Netflix for the series “Inventing Anna,” for $320,000, the sketches are a way for her to be able to continue telling her story.
Last week’s group show featured five works Delvey did while imprisoned that were re-made on a larger scale, and colored in by fellow artist and former con Alfredo Martinez, who spent several years in a Brooklyn prison in the early 2000s for forging works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Martinez, who went on two hunger strikes while inside because authorities confiscated his jailhouse artwork, was able to get Delvey’s attention through an item in Page Six saying that he’d fallen in love with the convict’s pencil-on-paper drawings featuring themes of money, fashion and incarceration.
He tells us, “I was only able to get a hold of Anna because you ran the Page Six story. She finally called me back, and I told her a joke, like ‘What does a guy have to do to get a girls attention in this town?'”
One of Delvey’s sketches features the NY Post.theannadelvey/InstagramOne of Delvey’s sketches features her lying on a couch reading the paper with the words “New York Post sentenced me to 15 years, turned me into a lesbian, married me off, and then deported me. Rude. Love Them.”
“Anna could not get larger format paper into the prison, they denied it,” Martine explains. “We couldn’t get any of the originals out that early so she worked with Alfredo,” who re-drew them as larger pieces.
Delvey was convicted of scamming about $200,000 from banks and luxury hotels, while also trying to obtain a $22 million loan to start an elite art club. She is currently awaiting deportation to Germany.
