Mary Frank

Mary Frank was born in London, England in 1933 and moved to the United States at the age of seven. In 1950 she began creating wood sculptures, and would later study with both Hans Hofmann and Max Beckmann. Frank’s first solo exhibition took place in New York in 1961. In 1969 she began a long-term concentration on figurative clay sculpture. Many of these sculptures were monumental in scale and consisted of multiple sheets of thin, folded clay. She established a national reputation in this medium and it became the primary focus of her work throughout the 1970s and 80s. In the early 1990s, Frank turned primarily to oil painting and later, also photography. 

Mary Frank has been the subject of numerous solo museum and gallery exhibitions over the years, including the solo exhibition Mary Frank: Finding My Way Home which originated at the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, in 2014 and traveled to the Butler Institute in Youngstown, OH, in 2015. In 2014 the documentary film, Visions of Mary Frank, was produced and released by filmmaker John Cohen. In 2000, the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY presented a major traveling retrospective of the artist’s paintings, Encounters, which was accompanied by a book with text by Linda Nochlin, published by Abrams. Hayden Herrera was the author of a major survey of Mary Frank’s career that was published in 1990 and Shadows of Africa, a collaboration with author Peter Matthiessen, was published in 1992, both by Abrams. Frank’s work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.