Fran Forman
Fran’s photo-paintings are in the permanent collections of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM, Washington, DC), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Grace Museum, Abilene, The Sunnhordland Museum, Norway, the Conner Collection at The University of Texas, and the North Down Museum, Northern Ireland.
Fran’s lataest book, The Rest Between Two Notes: Selected Work by Fran Forman, was published by Unicorn in 2020 and has won an International Photo Award and been selected as a best photo-book for 2020 by Elizabeth Avedon and What Will You Remember.Escape Artist: The Art of Fran Forman, was published by Schiffer Books in 2014 and has also won several prizes including a Best Photo-Book by Elizabeth Avedon. Fran has mounted many solo exhibitions, including The Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, England, The Massachusetts State House (The Griffin Museum of Photography), AfterImage Gallery (Dallas), the University of North Dakota, Galeria Photo/Graphica (Mexico), and the Pucker Gallery (Boston), as well as numerous group shows. She has won numerous awards and prizes and has been featured in other magazines and publications.
She held a succession of positions in the field of design, and was an art director at AOL Time Warner, where she designed the preeminent web site devoted to African American culture. Between professional life and raising her two daughters, Fran continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, and the dislocations of time and place.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Fran studied art and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and then received an MSW, working for several years with heroin addicts. She earned an MFA from Boston University in graphic design, but spent most of her grad school years experimenting in the darkroom.
Today Fran is an Affiliated Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and teaches workshops nationally and abroad. She is also a recipient of grants from the Sassower, Tyre, Tavris, and Puffin Foundations. She has been a Resident Artist at Holsnoy Kloster, Norway, The Millary Colony for the Arts, The Studios of Key West, and the Vermont Studio Center.
She is represented by Pucker Gallery (Boston), Afterimage Gallery (Dallas), Susan Spiritus Gallery (Newport Beach, CA), Sohn Fine Art (Lenox, MA), and Galeria Photo/Graphica (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico).
