Born in Riga, Latvia, now residing in New Jersey, Irena Ungar is an award winning published artist that goes back to the day's of sidewalk vendors and Greenwich Village art shows of the seventies.
She has been considered by her peers as the vintage leftover hippy that still keeps the true spirit and consciousness of what it meant to be tuned into the psychedelic journey of these bygone years.
Even though she does not take the responsibility of starting the sidewalk art movement in the Village with her husband Vismuts Krastins, better known as Kris, in the early seventies, their friends and clients who knew them best, would disagree.
They were not commercially motivated, but concentrated their work only on instinct and momentary collapse of reality in order to tap unto the deeper abstract resources of their talented and restless imaginations.

For the most part their winters were spent in South Beach, Miami, Florida and the areas seasonal art shows, returning to New York for the annual spring art show in Greenwich Village and the East Coast summer shows. Cape May, New Jersey became their summer home in the eighties, and the winters were spent in Sacramento, California, and Ft. Myers Florida.
The past ten years were spent in New Jersey caring for Irena's ailing mother and concentrating mostly on commercial decorative art that both, Kris and Irena shared in producing. Since the untimely death of her husband Kris she has returned to her original dreams of the early years.

Irena's first major work of art was a huge pencil mural across a freshly painted wall as high as a two year old could reach. When asked by her maternal grandmother "What is that?" Irena whispered "a Forest." From that time on her grandmother who was a published author and a talented industrial artist and teacher, guided Irena's artistic development until her passing in 1978. Irena also attended a girls art's highschool, School of Visual Arts and took courses in the New York Art League. Through the years she has had her work published on numerous occasions, but has not seriously pursued it, finding it to constricting.
Both Irena and Kris being restless spirits cherished the freedom to explore unfamiliar and new horizons.

She can be reached at Nunukasir@aol.com