Visiting Artist: Dana Frankfort

Merging graffiti and high art abstraction, Dana Frankfort’s paintings occupy a hazy space between verbal and visual communication. Using text as a platform for expressive embellishment, each canvas reveals a word or phrase within its sumptuous, intensely colored surface; simple statements such as ‘Believe’, ‘Beyond’, or ‘Paint’ become esoteric starting points for the physical negotiation of painting. Repeatedly scrawled, painted over, scribbled out, and intensified, each slogan becomes abstracted as a series of intersecting lines, curves and angles, their meanings amplified and distorted through the gesture and surface quality of their manifestation. Frankfort received an MFA from Yale in 1997 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. One-person exhibitions include The Space Between Paintings, Carillon Gallery, Fort Worth, TX; HIT OR MISS, James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA; Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Bellwether Gallery, New York, NY; Inman Gallery; and Kantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her paintings were included in the group exhibition Abstract America: New Painting from the U.S., Saatchi Gallery, London; and in Learning by Doing: 25 Years of the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Frankfort received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Rice University, Houston, TX, and The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Part of the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series at Boston University.