Frances Barth

Frances Barth
Born1946
The Bronx, New York
NationalityAmerican
EducationHunter College
Known forPainting, video, animation, graphic novel
Spouses
  • Ron Nakahara
​
(divorced)​
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman, Joan Mitchell, Pollock-Krasner, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb, American Academy of Arts and Letters,
WebsiteFrances Barth
Frances Barth, Untitled Ramble, acrylic on panels (triptych), 24" x 96", 2018.

Frances Barth (born 1946) is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works.[1][2][3] She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor.[4][5][6] Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth's paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness ... [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."[7]

Barth has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship[8] and Anonymous Was a Woman Award,[9] among others. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),[10] the Dallas Museum of Art,[11] and in the Whitney[12] and Venice Biennials.[13] Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[14] MoMA,[10] and Whitney Museum,[15] among others. She is director emerita of the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).[8]

  1. ^ Waltemath, Joan. "Frances Barth: Scale, Economy and Unnamable Color," The Brooklyn Rail, February 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  2. ^ Brody, David. "Nothing Forced Yet Nothing Lax: Frances Barth in Bushwick," Artcritical, December 7, 2017. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  3. ^ Kalina, Richard. "Frances Barth," Art in America, October 1994, p. 133.
  4. ^ Perrone, Jeff. "Frances Barth," Artforum, March 1978. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  5. ^ O'Brien, Barbara. Being and Belief: The Paintings of Frances Barth, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2005.
  6. ^ Moos, David. "Atlanta — 'Dimension,'" Art Papers, March/April p. 33–4.
  7. ^ Wilkin, Karen. "Extreme Possibilities: New Modernist Paradigms," Extreme Possibilities, New York: The Painting Center, 2009.
  8. ^ a b John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Frances Barth, Fellows. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  9. ^ McNatt, Glenn. "With Award, Barth Is Anonymous No More," The Baltimore Sun, December 30, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
  10. ^ a b Museum of Modern Art. Frances Barth, Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  11. ^ Brettell, Rick. "DMA Abstraction Exhibition Mixes it Up," Dallas Morning News, March 6, 2015.
  12. ^ Whitney Museum of American Art. Whitney Biennial 1973, Exhibitions. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
  13. ^ Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Frontiers Reimagined: Art that Connects Us, Venice: Museo di Palazzo Grimani, 2015. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
  14. ^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frances Barth, Art Collection. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  15. ^ Whitney Museum of American Art. Frances Barth, Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022.