Frances Barth is a noted American artist and teacher. She makes abstract paintings and videos and has been the director of the multi-disciplinary Graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art, the Mount Royal School of Art, since 2004. Frances was born in the Bronx, in New York City, and studied painting at Hunter College.  She has exhibited her paintings widely in both solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960’s, and her work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, in NYC, The Dallas Museum of Art, TX, The Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo. Frances showed six of her paintings in the 2015 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Grimani in "Frontiers Reimagined". Her awards include The National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974 and 1982, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 1995, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase awards in ’99 and ’04, the Anonymous Was a Woman grant in 2006, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017. Frances is married to the actor/director Ron Nakahara. She is the Director Emeritus of the Mt.Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute.  She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 and is in the canon of historically significant women abstract painters working in New York since the 1970's. 

Early in her career, Frances also performed with Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas in New York City in live performance and video/film. During the last ten years she has created two animations, a documentary, and a short b&w film set in 1947, while remaining always focused on her painting.  Around 1970, while in the John St. studio, Frances began working on large horizontal abstract paintings that were involved with ideas of gravity, slow painting time, indeterminate color, and trying to create a complex painting space that appeared geometric, but alternately shifted into a deeper space. The color acted simultaneously as atmosphere and object. In 1972 Marcia Tucker visited the studio and put Barth’s painting “Henning” in the Whitney Museum Painting Annual. By 1980 her painting had shifted to include referential markers and moved to a more evident landscape/mapped space that has a geological narrative. Frances had studied geology and while on a trip to Hawaii heard a Maori “reading” of abstract patterning that chanted a retelling of their voyage. She began thinking of how abstraction could hold meanings and act metaphorically.

Since then she has focused her work to include a linear narrative, almost like a creation story, over a period of geological time. She has pushed her painting into a realm between landscape, mapping and abstraction. The light in the paintings acts as phenomenon, and at the same time the abstract color creates an experience of light and plac

Courtesy of Silas Von Morisse Gallery