SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
- The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
- The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
- The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
- The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
- The Art Institute of Chicago, IL
- The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
- The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
- Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
Mary Frank was born in London in 1933 and moved to the United States at the age of seven. In the early 1950s she began carving wood sculpture, and studied with Hans Hoffman and Max Beckmann. In 1969, she began working on large multi-part, figurative clay sculptures until the early 80’s.
Over the course of Frank’s career, she has worked in many mediums and materials, most notably with her monoprints, drawings, sculpture, painting and photography. As described by art critic John Yau, Frank paints “elemental worlds largely inhabited by women (men, plants and animals) who are maenads, oracles, winged creatures and warriors –solitary and self-sustaining beings…(her) photographs of tableaus, which she assembles out of a variety of works she has made in different mediums, are all in pursuit of further defining the conditions of a mythic world.” -John Yau
Mary Frank has been the subject of numerous solo museum and gallery exhibitions over the years. Hayden Herrera is the author of Mary Frank, a major survey of Mary Frank’s work that was published in 1990 by Abrams, New York. Shadows of Africa, a collaboration between the artist and poet Peter Matthiessen, was published by Abrams in 1992
