SHE IS STILL ACTIVELY MAKING ART, REVISITING HER EARLIER PRODUCTIONS, AND SPEAKING UP FOR THE POWER OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
Published on May 11, 2025
by Edward M. Gómez, with Mary Frank
NEW YORK — We first met the artist Mary Frank, who is now 92 years young, in brutjournal’s May 2024 issue, at which time we examined some unusual photo self-portraits she had made featuring herself hiding coquettishly behind various hand-painted, paper or cardboard masks she had produced several years ago. Throughout her career, Frank has often dipped back into portions of her own oeuvre for material she revisits and repurposes, making some of her works palimpsests of her own artistic production.
Frank’s art has been influenced by her abiding interests in history, culture, society, language, human relations, and literature, along with a preoccupation with nature and its forces.
Born in London in 1933, Frank and her parents later moved to the United States. Her American mother, Eleanore Lockspeiser (1909–1986), was a painter; her British father, Edward Lockspeiser (1905–1973), was a musicologist and art critic. At first, Mary lived with her maternal grandparents in Brooklyn, New York, and in the 1940s studied modern dance with Martha Graham. She earned admission to New York City’s High School of Music and Art and, as a teenager, continued studying dance.
In the 1950s, in New York, she studied with the influential painter-teachers Hans Hofmann and Max Beckmann, both of whom, like Mary, had immigrated to the U.S. from Europe. In 1950, in New York, she married the Swiss photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019), whose groundbreaking photobook, The Americans, was first published in France in 1958 as Les Américains. Mary and Robert separated in 1969; their children, a daughter and a son, both died as young adults. Those events profoundly affected the two artists’ lives and, in tangible ways, their respective approaches to making art.
Several weeks ago, I caught up with Frank at her studio in downtown Manhattan. By that time, Donald J. Trump’s illegal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) already had begun steamrolling its way brutally through various federal-government agencies, firing thousands of personnel and canceling many ongoing programs. At the same time, the Trump regime had made clear its intentions to crush democratic norms and instill fear among government employees, the media, educational institutions, and the population as a whole.
Mary Frank told me, “It’s so extreme that there is not one living thing that is not going to be affected by the destruction [Trump] is causing — not only to [American] democracy, but to every leaf or animal, to every bird or fish, to the oceans and to the air. There is nothing that is not going to be affected by [his actions] in the most horrendous ways. I speak to people on the street, people whom I do not know, and it’s so common to hear, ‘I don’t like politics and I don’t listen to the news. I know that bad things are happening, but no politics!’ To which I say, ‘No politics for you, but politics is attached to your life in every way, and if you’re not feeling [the effects of the government’s policies and actions] now, you will by next week.”
In a democracy, aren’t citizens obliged — more than obliged; in fact, don’t they have a responsibility — to be actively engaged in the political life of their communities and of the nation?
Frank replied, “But so many people feel that politics is dirty and they don’t want to get their hands dirty. But what about the hands that are dirtying the world?”
Aren’t citizens who are passive or apathetic with regard to politics exactly what fascist strongmen want to see? Doesn’t the citizens’ resignation effectively fuel the power grabbers’ audacious moves and extremism?
With this in mind, Frank noted that the Trump regime “is using the people’s passivity — and they’re moving fast.”
Frank points out that her second husband, with whom she lives in New York, “left Germany in 1938; he got our before Kristallnacht by just three weeks. [Kristallnacht was the night of November 9–10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and their property throughout Germany and Austria.] They already had attacked his father’s store. He was very lucky to have gotten out.”
We touched upon the notion of history repeating itself. Frank observed, “Sometimes it appears that it does, but today, it’s the speed at which events are taking place. The speed!”
Over the many years of her long life, Frank has experienced numerous challenges and hardships. Nevertheless, today, does she regard herself as an optimist (someone who tends to see the glass half full and believes that, somehow, everything is going to turn out alright) or as a hopeful person (someone who keeps a flame of positive thinking burning, hoping that things will turn out well)?
With regard to the situation in the U.S.A. and, more broadly, in the world today, the artist said, “I’m certainly not optimistic. It’s not that I’ve never been optimistic, but, right now, it’s impossible to be optimistic and to be awake at all.”
She said that it’s hard for her to remain hopeful about the future but that she makes an effort to do so and that her sense of hope is conveyed through the art she has been making more recently, even if only “obliquely,” as she put it.
In recent months, she has been making drawings, collages, and mixed-media works featuring monkeys and other allusions to nature. She said that her art does not “make a separation” between the energy or spirit of her time and her hope for a better future, but rather that it “includes” all of those forces.
She also showed me a slightly larger-than-life painting she made years ago depicting a soldier in uniform. His figure is cut out, so the picture resembles a gigantic paper doll. Frank explained that she originally created her soldier image back in 2003 during the period leading up to the launch of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which was based on his government’s lies about the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime possessing and developing weapons of mass destruction.
At that time, in New York, she took part in demonstrations protesting the U.S.A.’s imminent attack on Iraq. She carried her big, painted placard to those events; it showed her soldier holding a sign saying, “NO WAR!”
Later, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2023, Frank revised her soldier placard, draping her figure in ribbons in the colors of the Ukrainian national flag — blue and yellow.
More recently, she has trotted out her soldier placard again, this time to protest Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza. She has walked up and down Sixth Avenue with her picture-sign. Frank, who is a Jewish American, said, “Sometimes, people have called out in support of my call for peace, and sometimes others have hurled criticism at me for daring to call for an end to the violence.”
Those who have followed the evolution of Mary Frank’s art over the years are aware that an underlying current that pulses through all of it and emerges as one of its overarching themes is her celebration of her recognition of an enduring, universal life force. Therein lies her sense of hopefulness; for her, that’s where the evidence of such an outlook or sensibility may be found.
In these uncertain, unsettling times, when some artists might feel that making art seems like a pointless or maybe even a decadent activity, does Frank have any advice to offer the discouraged and dispirited?
She replied, “Even I feel like that sometimes. But the act of creating a painting, a poster, a song or whatever you might be making — it connects the profound parts of ourselves with others.”
Frank gave me a big smile and, on her worktable, shuffled around some hand-painted cutouts as she contemplated a composition-in-progress.
She showed me an unusual photo collage a friend had made for her, in which Frank as a very young girl and the artist today, as an older woman, appear side by side.
We agreed, across the generations that divided us, that, in these dark times, it’s important for creative people of all kinds to keep making their work — in defiance, of course, of those whose depraved, determined mission is to carry out destruction and death.
By expressing ourselves creatively and artistically, we accomplish what fascists can never dream of achieving.
Through our work as artists, we reaffirm life.