Mary Frank “What Color Courage?”

DC Moore Gallery

[Image: Mary Frank "The Sea Around Us" (2022) Oil, acrylic, and collage on board, 36 x 48 in.]

This event has ended.

Living color; rooting embedded
rising up yet
gravity seeking
refuged unknowingly
Clustered species questing
Trembling scalding and sacrificial

I/we witness to this, our world now

- Mary Frank

DC Moore Gallery will present What Color Courage?, an exhibition of new and historic work by Mary Frank (b. 1933), featuring mixed media paintings, painted stones, sculptures, along with several groups of works on paper from 1990-2022.

Mary Frank’s new paintings contain layered elements that recall the artist’s engagement with other mediums, incorporating photographs of her own early sculptures, painted stones, and prints collaged onto their surfaces. This movement back and forth between two and three dimensional surfaces creates a narrative connecting the work, spinning together a sort of cosmos bound by the repetition and transformation of these images.

Mythical human/animal hybrids and silhouetted figures are placed in stark landscapes dramatized by swirling elemental color, fiery crimsons and deep blues. Mary’s use of mythological imagery imbues the work with a sense of timelessness, however, the raw urgency of expression makes it clear that the work is primarily concerned with what it means to be alive right now. Mary explains that for her, to work now in any form– as an artist or activist– one cannot ignore the world as it currently is in all its complexity.

The exhibition includes two papier-maché sculptures from the 1980s, Chimera (1984), and Trajectories (1988-89). Like her recent paintings, these works relate outwardly to primal, universal themes and inwardly to the microcosm of Frank’s work. For Chimera, she used discarded monoprints as the material for the papier-maché. The chimera, a lion-antelope-serpent hybrid from ancient Greek mythology, is at once an image of brutality and of tenderness, mutable and never-ending.

As Mary describes, her work is a visceral response to the act of bearing witness to the world in a time of crisis. Her iconography–– tempests, fire, flood–– evoke the reality of frequent and escalating natural disasters, and their impact on human and animal lives. In that spirit, the artist would like to dedicate this show to all the people working to save the planet.