Estate of Ellen Frank (1946-2021)
Artist, scholar, and writer, Ellen Frank was the recipient of many awards in painting, book design, and scholarship.
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Ellen Eve Frank was an American artist, writer, and educator, based in New York. She was known for her illuminated manuscripts, which often incorporated precious metals such as gold leaf, on murals and scrolls, linens, and panels. She founded the Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation which promotes the art of illumination and the creation of new works of art in the genre. Frank was born in Los Angeles and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles; her Master of Arts and Ph.D in literature and visual arts from Stanford and Yale universities, respectively. She was Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley from 1973 to 1977.
Frank published several written works, among them Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition (University of California Press) and various other essays on the topics of painting, architecture, and literature. Her publication Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition (University of California Press) has won several awards, including the "Best of All Award Winning Books" by Book Builders West, The Ronce & Coffin Club Design Award, and the New York Institute for Graphic Arts 50 Best Books. She co-wrote a play titled [email protected] with Maria Pessino who is the founder and director of Oddfellows Productions. The Theatre for the New in New York City hosted the play for its first reading, and Robert Wilson's Watermill Center hosted the second reading in July 1999.
In her lifetime, Frank received various awards and recognition for her work in both painting and writing. She was accepted as a Fulbright Fellow to further her studies in Aesthetic Theory under Sir Ernst Gombrich. Frank also received the Ford Foundation Grant in Lithography, a Pollock-Krasner Award in Painting, and a New York Foundation of the Arts Award in 1997 for her illuminated manuscript. Frank's art has been exhibited throughout the United States, including the Soho Guggenheim to inaugurate "T", where she showed a sequence of 18 paintings. Also, in 1999 J/Brice of Boston, MA commissioned Frank to create an 84-foot mural in copper, gold, and silver leaf on linen. In 2001, Frank was invited to be Professor and Guest Artist at Barnard College and at Rutgers University.
In 2004, Frank founded the not-for-profit organization, Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation, where she long served as the artistic director. The organization is focused on the art of illumination and the creation of new works of art in this genre. The goal of the Foundation is to revitalize the art form of Illumination, while promoting peace education and bridging religious gaps.
In 2005, the organization created the Illumination Arts Atelier, a workshop that was modeled after the traditional Renaissance ateliers. Accepting interns from South Korea, the United States, Columbia, Japan, and Poland, the atelier taught students about manuscript illumination and illuminated painting using 22 karat gold leaf, silver leaf, copper leaf, linen, vellum, paper, papyrus, and egg tempura.
Cities of Peace, the first work created at the Illumination Arts Atelier, consists of nine, 6 x 8 foot paintings that are illuminated with gold. Each of the nine paintings represents a different city that has been traumatized by war and honors the particular city's history and culture. The cities include Beijing, Hiroshima, Kabul, Baghdad, and New York City. Cities of Peace premiered in the Laurie M. Tisch Gallery in New York City in 2005. In 2009, it was exhibited in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
Frank passed away in 2021 after a brief illness.
Statement
Born in Los Angeles, CA on April 26, 1946, Ellen lived a life dedicated to peace building, illuminating beauty, and creating positive change through the visual arts. In 2004, she founded Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation, a non-profit global organization dedicated to the transformative power of art to build a culture of understanding and peace. "Cities of Peace Illuminated" is its primary initiative which includes a collection of monumental gold-illuminated paintings honoring the history and culture of world cities that have experienced devastating conflict and trauma. The paintings draw upon artistic traditions unique to each city honored, as diverse as illuminated maps, manuscripts, icons, tapestries, embroidery, architectural mosaics, woodcarvings and metalwork. Crimson leaf, the color of our blood, is tucked into each painting to honor the dead. Throughout her long career, Ellen Frank received many awards including a Fulbright Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts award, Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Pollock Krasner Award in Painting. Dr. Frank studied art history and connoisseurship at Yale, the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes in London, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and the Visual Arts from Stanford. She was Assistant Professor of English Literature at UC Berkeley, where she also completed her undergraduate work.