Frances Stark
1967–
An artist and writer, Frances Stark draws inspiration from her professional and personal life as well as from literature, music, and pop culture. Her work is infused with humor and wit, often of a self-deprecating variety in which the pressures of life and making art become generative subject matter. Mining topics both common and erudite, and often incorporating text into her work, Stark has featured her children and pet cats in videos, created abstract compositions utilizing quotations from writers such as Robert Musil and Samuel Beckett, and participated in Internet sex chats that developed into the script for an animated video. Often, the act of production—or, even more so, the hesitancy and procrastination that precedes making—is emphasized in her works, becoming a self-referential source of inspiration itself.
Stark’s collage Push depicts the door to the artist’s Los Angeles studio and a stream of mail passing through it. The barrage of bills, exhibition announcement cards, and junk mail—all of which are physically incorporated into the drawing— represents the outside world interfering with the contemplative space of the artist’s work environment. Rather than letting the mail become another item on her to-do list, Stark turns a tedious chore into a work that directly conflates the competing concerns of art and life. Known for her use of double entendres and wordplay, Stark has titled the work after the ubiquitous door sign but also as an allusion to the act of refusal. Push forces the extraneous out of the studio and returns it to the world.
Introduction
Frances Stark (born 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose work centers on the use and meaning of language, and the translation of this process into the creative act. She often works with carbon paper to hand-trace letters, words, and sentences from classic works by Emily Dickinson, Goethe, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and others to explore the voices and interior states of writers. She uses these hand-traced words, often in repetition, as visual motifs in drawings and mixed media works that reference a subject, mood, or another discipline such as music, architecture, or philosophy.
Wikidata identifier
Q16197269
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 25, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, collagist, conceptual artist, painter, photographer, video artist, writer
ULAN identifier
500294304
Names
Frances Stark
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 25, 2025.
