John Frame

John Fayette Frame (born November 27, 1950) is an American sculptor, photographer, composer and filmmaker. He has been working as an artist in California since the early 1980s. Frame has been given Grants and Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has participated in group exhibitions around the world and has had major solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. After five years of preparation, Part One of "The Tale of the Crippled Boy", a sweeping project incorporating sculpture, photography, installation, music and film, premiered at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in March 2011.

Life Frame was born in Colton, California. His father, Rudolph Randolph Frame, had only a third-grade education and was a welder and sheet metal worker for the Santa Fe Railway. His mother, Mildred Louise Frame (née Jones) was a cook in a local middle school. He has two siblings, Robert Wayne Frame (born 1931) and Phyllis Louise Frame Runyon (born 1943). After his graduation from the Colton School District, he attended San Diego State University from 1968 to 1969 and then left Southern California. During the following four years, he traveled through Europe and North America. He held multiple jobs including assistant manager of a discount department store, gas station attendant, bookstore employee, dishwasher, library assistant, and construction worker. From 1970 to 1971 he was employed by the state psychiatric hospital of New Hampshire as a psychiatric aide for the criminally insane. He returned to Southern California in 1972 and completed an undergraduate degree in English at San Diego State University in 1975. In 1972 he met Laura Lynn Dierker and they were married in 1977. They have three children: Katherine Lynn (born 1981), Ashley Fayette (born 1985), and Lilian M. (born 1987). The Los Angeles drawing group met in his studio on a weekly basis between 1992 and 2001 to draw from live models. Frame also originated the Los Angeles collaborative group known as the Bastards.This group consisted of Frame, Jon Swihart, Steve Galloway, Michael C. McMillan, F. Scott Hess and Peter Zokosky. The Bastards completed more than 60 collaborative works and had two exhibitions, one at Hunsaker/Schlesinger gallery in Los Angeles and one at the Davidson gallery in Seattle, Washington. After college, he began creating his own work, experimenting with drawing, painting, and printmaking before coming to sculpture. (To Hear the Sirens' Song and Live, the earliest work appearing in his 2005 retrospective show, was created in 1980.) This focus represents a conscious departure from the abstract and conceptualist art that was popular when he attended graduate school and that has continued to dominate from an academic point of view. Critics have noted other diverse echoes and influences in Frame's work, including 19th century allegorical statuary, romanesque and gothic effigies, American Arts and Crafts, and cubism His work has been noted to have commonalities with that of Joseph Cornell,

His sculptural output increased between 1984 and 1990. In the mid-1990s, he began to incorporate found objects into his pieces, a practice he has continued into the present. Combining “humanistic concerns with irony, intellect, and psychological insight” they deal with the human condition, spirituality, and nature, His work has been criticized for its approach to gender (his figures are generally perceived as male, though the artist has said that he perceives them as “genderless”) And, in fact, Frame has completed this project (including music, lighting, and photography) with only the help of a few friends and family members.

The work also shares thematic consistency with the artist's previous work, according to curators Kevin Murphy and Jessica Todd Smith, who state, “In keeping with the work John Frame has created throughout his career, the tale and the art associated with it evoke universal human themes—the nature of good and evil, the inevitability of death, and the struggle to find meaning in life—but always in a connotative rather than denotative manner.” The production was in tandem with the Portland Opera where Faust opened on June 8, 2018.

Solo exhibitions 2012 Portland Art Museum, Stott Gallery, Portland, Oregon 2011 The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California 2005 Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California 1999 Kohn/Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1996 Kohn/Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1993 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1992 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California 1990 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1987 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1984 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, California 1983 Installation Gallery, San Diego, California 1982 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, California Mattingly Baker Gallery, Dallas, Texas 1981 Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Frame has participated in at least 62 group exhibitions. A partial list appears below: 2001, “Representing L.A.,” Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA 1997, “Bastards: Individual and Collaborative Works, “Hunsaker/Schlesinger, Santa Monica, CA 1997, “Blessings and Beginnings,” Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, CA 1995, “Burning Lights: Spirituality, Tradition, and Craft in Recent Art From the City of Angels,” Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, Catalog, Illus. 1994, “beyond appearance,” The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, and California College of Arts and crafts, Oakland, CA, Catalog, Illus 1994, “The Fifth International Shoe Box Sculpture Exhibition,” Taiwan Museum of Art, Taichung, Taiwan, Catalog, Illus. 1991, “Individual Realities in the California ArtScene,” Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo Japan. Seibu Tsukashin Hall, Amagasaki, Japan, Catalog, Illus. 1991, “Drawings,” Koplin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1990, “Fourth International Shoe Box Sculpture Exhibition,” University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, Catalog, Illus. 1989, “Art From Los Angeles,” Nakazawa Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. 1987, “Avant-garde in the Eighties,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Catalog, Illus. 1985, “Spektrum Los Angeles,” Galerie Hartje, Berlin, Germany. Catalog, Illus. 1984, “Return of the Narrative,” Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, Catalog, Illus. 1984, “Three Sculptors: John Frame, Sam Hernandez, Gary Martin,” ARCO Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles, CA, Catalog, Illus. 1981, “Newcomers 1981,” Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Frame’s work can also be found in more than three hundred public and private collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the University of Southern California, and The Renwick Gallery of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Frame has been artist-in-residence, visiting artist or guest lecturer at more than fifty museums, universities and art-related institutions around the United States. He has also taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and the Claremont Graduate School.