The Art Program of the Performing and Creative Arts Department at the College of Staten Island/CUNY presents Visiting Artist and Professor Rachel Frank who will speak on “What Is Soft Sculpture?” on Wednesday, Aug. 29 in the Center for the Arts Sculpture Studio (Building 1P, Room 107) from 6:30pm to 7:30pm.
What is Soft Sculpture? Meet visiting artist and Professor Rachel Frank who is teaching the first five-week Sculpture segment of the course, Art 312 Visiting Artist Projects. The sculpture portion is an introduction to the use of fabric and other soft materials to create sculpture through techniques of assembly and construction. The work of artists who create soft sculpture will be illustrated. Traditional techniques such as hand sewing, patternmaking, embroidery, macramé, and knot tying are demonstrated. Embedded personal, social, and cultural histories will be discussed, as well as how they may impact and enable the realization of a work’s content.
Born and raised in Kentucky, Rachel Frank received her BFA from The Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from The University of Pennsylvania. Her work uses sculpture, theater, and performance to explore the tensions between the natural world and the synthetic, the animal and the political, and the past and the present. Her first exposure to the tableau vivant type of sculptural performance that she uses in her art was through the Christmas nativity that was perfomed in the Lutheran church that she attended as a child. The congregation was so small that only four children were available to fill the roles. Every year, she would perform the parts for all the animals in the nativity, playing a donkey, a camel, and a sheep.
Rachel Frank is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, and The Franklin Furnace Archive. She has attended residencies at Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Sculpture Space, The Women’s Studio Workshop, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her performance pieces have been shown at HERE, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Select Fair, and the Bushwick Starr in New York City and The Marran Theater at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. In 2017, her solo show Rachel Frank: Past Future Tense was presented at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Times Square, NYC. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
This is a Co-curricular (CC) CLUE event.
