Nicholas Frank multidisciplinary art works, including painting, video, installation, photography, sound and artist books, are often presented within the framework of The Nicholas Frank Biography, a lifetime project detailing the history and historical significance of the output of the artist Nicholas Frank. Whether presented in museum-style surveys of past projects or as book pages, the “author” is unnamed, presumed by its third-person perspective to be other than Nicholas Frank. Book pages are presented singularly in frames or hand-bound, without benefit from the context given in the preceding and following pages.
Frank’s Pre-Selfies, photographs depicting people taking pictures of people, in the late moment (c. 2006-2009) just before selfies became pervasive. They are presented in unique, artist-designed frames that employ planar perspectives within each photograph. What selfies and pre-selfies share is that they are momentary removals from the flow of awareness, the program stopping to regard itself, again and again, like skips in a record, momentum resetting continually, a song taking a snapshot of itself. A companion piece, ‘Greatest Skips,’ is an LP of skips from the artist’s personal vinyl record collection, two 15-minute compositions of these minor incidental compositions.
Nicholas Frank recently relocated to San Antonio from Milwaukee after a Spring 2017 Artpace International Artist-in-Residence term. He is represented by the Green Gallery in Milwaukee and Western Exhibitions in Chicago, and has shown with Nathalie Karg and Laurel Gitlen in New York City. His work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial (inside the John Riepenhoff Experience), and he completed a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Workshop with mentor Barry Schwabsky in 2016. He has done projects at the Tate Modern, Swiss Institute, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Locust Projects, and co-founded the Milwaukee International Art Fair. His critical writing has been published in Possible Press, NYFA.com, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, Purple, X-tra, Artpapers as well as a catalogue essay, “David Foster Wallace: Nicholas Frank speaks with Brooke Kanther”, for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Frank ran the Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee from 1993-2001, was Program Curator of INOVA from 2005-2011, helped rewrite the Fine Arts curriculum at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design where he taught from 2008-2016, and now works with Amada Miller on the new Longview Gallery in San Antonio.