Angela Fraleigh

Angela Fraleigh (born 1976) is a contemporary American artist. Her oil and mixed media paintings explore themes such as gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics, in a style that weaves together realism, abstraction, and classical influences.

Angela Fraleigh
Born1976 (age 44–45)
Beaufort, SC
NationalityAmerican
EducationBoston University (BFA), Yale University (MFA)
Websitewww.angelafraleigh.com

Biography and education

Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural Hyde Park, New York where she attended Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School.[1] She later received her BFA in painting from Boston University, where she graduated magna cum laude, and her MFA in painting from the Yale University School of Art.[2][3] Fraleigh is an associate professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department. She currently resides and works in New York, NY, and Allentown, PA, where she lives with her husband, artist Wesley Heiss, and their daughter, Tuesday and Sagan.[4]

Work

Fraleigh works primarily in the medium of paint, although she has exhibited artworks in a variety of additional mediums, including drawing and sculpture. The process of creating these painted works varies and often involves a balance between control and chance. One such process used by Fraleigh involves rendering the figures using a traditional approach, then placing the canvas horizontally, introducing the element of chance through pours of mediums over the surface of the painting.[5]

Fraleigh has been described as a "Artistic painter," creating tactile and flowing surfaces in her paintings. Most of Fraleigh's paintings are figurative, depicting forms that are often obscured by "brushy, smeared or poured areas of color"[6] or exist in an abstract or flattened space. Fraleigh's decisions regarding what to display and what to leave hidden both facilitates narrative and disrupts it. Heavily influenced by literature and narrative structure, narrative has become the focus of Fraleigh's more recent bodies of work. Through a combination of representational figures and abstract elements, many of Fraleigh's painting have touched upon autobiographical elements, while others have focused on moments of sexual and physical tension, violence and desire, and underlying themes of power, class, gender, and identity.[7]

Fraleigh's 2014 body of work, displayed in the show Ghosts in the Sunlight at the Inman Gallery, continues to explore many of the themes established in her earlier work. Further sharpening a feminist lens through the destruction and reinvention of traditionally male-dominated art historical narratives,[8] in her recent paintings, Fraleigh "reconsiders the classic female nude by taking figures from Baroque and Rococo paintings and reexamining their surroundings, attire and gaze.[9]" By creating a new painted environment and context for the female figures, appropriated from old masterworks, Fraleigh gifts her female protagonists with a new identity and importance that is no longer dependent upon their objectification or submissiveness. These themes are also apparent in Fraleigh's 2015 painting series Lost in the Light, wherein the female figure is not obscured by abstract forms, but is instead hidden by the cropping and positioning of the figures. These unconventional portraits show women turned away or otherwise cut off from view, hiding their identity and thwarting the desire of the viewer to see or know more.

In her essay on Fraleigh's work, "Erotic Power and the Subversion of Myth," feminist writer and educator Jennifer Tyburczy writes that Fraleigh's work may be seen as a response to the prevalence of the eroticized female nude in art, as highlighted in John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Tyburczy posits that Fraleigh's work "takes the limitations of the archive, the museum, and the discipline of art history to task and exposes the structure and logic of these sites as social fields that manage the circulation of ideas and feelings on sexual display and spectatorship.[10]" The subversion of the male gaze is a common theme in Fraleigh's paintings, yet sexuality is never entirely absent in these works, and is explored alongside "other kinds of desire that can exist between women, like friendship, love, camaraderie, and tenderness.[11]"

Connections have been drawn between the all-female communities and relationships present in Fraleigh's artwork and the utopia depicted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel "Herland." Of this connection, writer and curator Kelly Baum notes that, like the citizens of Gilman's utopia, "the citizens of Fraleigh's utopia prioritize exchange and sociability.[12]" By freeing her female protagonists of their original contexts, Fraleigh explores not only how women relate and interact with one another and the environments they reside in, individually or in groups, but also the roles women play in an artistic space.

Fraleigh is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, TX.

Other media

Lost in the Light is a book collaboration between Fraleigh and writer Jen Werner on the occasion of Fraleigh's solo exhibition at the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY.

Awards and recognition

Fraleigh has been awarded numerous grants, residencies, and other recognitions, such as the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship; the CORE Artist in Residence Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the Eliza Randall Prize at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the CACHH, Individual Artist Grant Fellowship, Houston, TX; the Faculty Research and Development Grant at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA; Artist in Residence at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Artist in Residence at Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Artist in Residence at Can Serrat, El Bruc, Spain; Artist in Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX (deferred); and studio membership at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY. Fraleigh was also nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award as well as the Louis Comfort Tiffany grant.[13]

Teaching and lecturing

Fraleigh's visiting artist and lecturing experience includes universities, organizations, and institutions such as Lehman College, Bronx, NY; Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA; University of Houston, Houston, TX; Rice University, Houston, TX; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; NPR, www.kcur.org, Kansas City, MO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Moravian College, Bethlehem PA; Webster University, St. Louis, MO; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Bard College, Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA; Glassell School of Art, Houston, TX; and a panel discussion with Dana FriisHansen and Christopher French at the Inman Gallery, Houston, TX.

Collections
  • Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, MO
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
  • Trammel Crow
  • Oil Arts Inc.
  • TPR International

Selected solo exhibitions

2015

  • Lost in the Light, Vanderbilt Mansion, Hyde Park, NY

2014

  • Ghosts in the Sunlight, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX

2011

  • by the time I tell you it will all be forgotten, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX
  • far as my eyes could see, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA

2008

  • and I would shine in answer/ being/ without becoming, PPOW Gallery, NY, NY

2007

  • not one girl it think/ who looks on the light of the sun/ will ever have wisdom/ like this, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX
  • even, Heimbold Visual Art Center, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY
  • if not, winter, James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA

2006

  • then, for just a moment, H. Paty Eiffe Gallery, Moravian College, Bethlehem PA
  • there i still my thirst, Women and Their Work, Austin, TX

2005

  • forever is not enough, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX

Selected group exhibitions

2016

  • Arachne's Woof, Litvak Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
  • New Baroque: The Imperfect Pearl, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2015

  • Faculty Selects, Lafayette College, Easton, PA
  • (Em)Power Dynamics: Exploring the Modes of Female Empowerment and Representation in America, The Gateway Project Newark, NJ
  • Un-real, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • Speculum Speculorum- Mirror of Mirrors, Elizabeth Foundation, New York, NY
  • Area Artists Biennial, Siegal Gallery, Iococca Hall, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA
  • Zabardast (fabulous.), Twelve Gates Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

2014

  • Higher Learning, CUNY at Lehman College, New York, NY

2013

  • For Ed: Splendor in the Grass for Olympic Lad & Lass, Yale School of Art, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven, CT
  • Angela Fraleigh and Davin Watne: New Work, Rachael Cozad, Kansas City, MO
  • The Sweetest Taboo, Red Arrow Contemporary, Dallas, TX
  • M-Path, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
  • Instrument, Kulturemollan, Lovestad Sweden
  • The Tales They Told Us, Lexington Art League, Lexington, KY

2011-12

  • Collective Intelligence: Early-Human Narratives, Platform Gallery, IHC, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA
  • Work from the Compound, FPAC Gallery, Boston, MA
  • Synthetic Supports: Plastic is the New Paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

2009-10

  • Shadow and Light, Kulturemollan, Lovestad Sweden
  • Do I know you?, Inman Gallery Houston, TX

2008

  • Learning by Doing: 25 Years of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
  • Transfigure, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO
  • Dramas: Real and Imagined, Williams Tower, Houston, TX
  • Romancing the Skull, Mark Moore Gallery Santa Monica, CA

2007

  • The Bees: something swarming something, Brooklyn Fireproof, Brooklyn, NY
  • Phantasmania, Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, MO, curator Elizabeth Dunbar

2006

  • Artissima, Turin, Italy (with Inman Gallery)
  • Reality unchecked, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY
  • Drawing Inside/Out, Lawndale Art Center, Houston TX, curator Michelle White

2005

  • New Texas Painting, Diverseworks, Houston, TX
  • New Texas Acquisitions, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX
  • Evidence, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX
  • CORE exhibition, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX
  • Artists for Tsunami Relief Auction, Phillips de Pury & co., New York, NY
  • Drama, Romance, Loneliness, Neurosis and many more diseases of the soul, Massimo Audiello, New York, NY

2004

  • 48: HOURS Project Row Houses, Houston, TX
  • Blue Star 19: the anniversary show, San Antonio, TX
  • Art on the Avenue benefit auction, Houston, TX
  • Summer Drawings and Some Are Not... Mixture Contemporary Art, Houston, TX.
  • CORE exhibition, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX

2002-03

  • Diamonds fur kiss Mom & Dad birds. MFA Thesis Exhibition, Yale University Art Gallery
  • CAA Exhibition, Hunter College NY, NY

References
  1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School (1994). Orbit 1994. State College, PA: Jostens.
  2. "Angela Fraleigh". artnet. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  3. Baldwin, Rosecrans (15 December 2014). ""Ghosts in the Sunlight" an interview with Angela Fraleigh". The Morning News. The Morning News LLC. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  4. "Faculty & Staff". Moravian College. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  5. Angela Fraleigh (19 August 2014). "Inside the Artist's Studio: Angela Fraleigh" (web). Youtube: studioefa.
  6. Klassmeyer, Kelly (10 August 2011). "A Painterly Painter". Houston Press. Houston Press, LP. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  7. Drysdale, Rebekah (11 June 2008). "Angel Fraleigh". Daily Serving. DailyServing.com. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  8. Gregory, Casey (5 November 2014). "Angela Fraleigh: Ghosts in the Sunlight". Arts + Culture Texas. Arts and Culture Texas. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
  9. "(Un)Real". David Richard Gallery. David Richard Gallery, LLC. Retrieved 10 August 2016. Angela Fraleigh's newest work reconsiders the classic female nude by taking figures from Baroque and Rococo paintings and reexamining their surroundings, attire and gaze.
  10. Tyburczy, Jennifer (2016), "Erotic Power and the Subversion of Myth", in Dunbar, Elizabeth (ed.), Between Tongue and Teeth, Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum of Art
  11. Huete, Betsy (23 December 2014). "Angela Fraleigh: Ghosts in the Sunlight". Glasstire. Glasstire. Retrieved 10 August 2016. But desire doesn't always necessarily revolve around sex, and although many of the paintings in Fraleigh's latest series still seem sexually charged they also seem imbued with other kinds of desire that can exist between women, like friendship, love, camaraderie, and tenderness.
  12. Baum, Kelly (2016), "Herland", in Dunbar, Elizabeth (ed.), Between Tongue and Teeth, Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum of Art
  13. "Angela Fraleigh". Inman Gallery. Retrieved 10 August 2016.
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