Mary Frank: Finding My Way Home

Over the course of her career, Mary Frank has worked in sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking and recently encaustic and photography, suggesting that her primary loyalty is not to a particular way of working or to any medium, but rather to the power of direct expression and to the act of creation itself. All of this work evinces an eagerness to use the intuitions and improvisations that arise naturally during the creative process. The Museum is pleased to present a broad survey of Mary Frank’s work from across her long and accomplished career.

Mary Frank was born in London, England, in 1933 and moved to the United States at the age of seven. In the early 1950s she began carving wood sculpture, and briefly studied with Hans Hoffman and Max Beckmann. In 1969, she worked on large multi-part, figurative clay sculptures, drawings and monoprints, which remained the major focus of her work throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. In the 1990s, she turned to painting as her primary medium. Frank has been the subject of numerous solo museum and gallery exhibitions over the years, including a retrospective exhibition of sculpture, prints and drawings organized by the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY in 1978. Her work is in the permanent collections of the above institutions and other museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Newark Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Art Gallery.

Special thanks to the DC Moore Gallery and Elena Zang Gallery for their assistance.