As a student at Erie Technical High School, Richard Anuszkiewicz took art classes every day from Joseph Plavcan. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art on scholarship (B.F.A. 1953) and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship his final year that he used to study with Josef Albers at Yale University's School of Art and Architecture. Attempting at first to reconcile Albers' color and compositional theories with the realism he had been practicing since high school, he eventually focused on abstraction. After Yale (M.F.A. 1955) Anuszkiewicz continued to paint while attending Kent State University (B.S. in Education, 1956). He was given his first one-man exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio in 1955.
In 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved to New York and worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for awhile, repairing scale models of classical Greek architecture and sculpture, then at Tiffany and Company (1958-1959), designing miniature silver animals. He also traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa during this period.
Anuszkiewicz' first one-man show in New York was held at the Contemporaries Gallery in 1960, from which Alfred Barr bought a painting for the Museum of Modern Art. By mid-decade, Anuszkiewicz's work had been featured in such seminal exhibitions as Geometric Abstraction in America (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1962) and The Responsive Eye (Museum of Modern Art, 1965). The latter helped secure his reputation as a leading proponent of the American "op art" movement in the 1960s. In keeping with Albers' Bauhaus sensibility, Anuszkiewicz undertook various commercial projects, including the design of playing cards, banners, serving trays and even a painted fur coat. In 1972 he designed outdoor murals for a YWCA building in New York City and an office building in Jersey City.
Anuszkiewicz' interest in prints, specifically Japanese prints, developed at Yale. The first prints he produced were screenprints--Christmas cards for the Museum of Modern Art from 1963 to 1965. His first lithograph was offset, executed in 1964. In addition to Graphicstudio, Anuszkiewicz has worked in New York at Atelier Editions, Chiron Press, Lassiter-Musel, New York Institute of Technology Print Workshops (Old Westbury), and Triton Press, and in Stuttgart at Edition Domberger, and Peter Haas. His prints have been featured in one-man exhibitions organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (1979), and the Fine Arts Gallery, Florida State University, Tallahassee (1981). Other solo exhibitions have included those at The Cleveland Museum of Art (1966), Hopkins Art Center, Dartmouth College (1967), De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (1972), La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (1976), John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota (1978), Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1980), Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida (1981), Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables (1981), Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown (1984), Tampa Museum (1986), Cleveland Institute of Art (1988), and Newark Museum, New Jersey (1990). (Fine/Corlett 1991, 99)