Angela Fraleigh

Biography and education

Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural New York. She received her BFA in painting from Boston University, where she graduated magna cum laude, and her MFA in painting from the Yale University School of Art. Fraleigh is an associate professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department. She currently resides and works in New York, NY, and Allentown, PA, where she lives with her husband, artist Wesley Heiss, and their daughter, Tuesday.

Work

Fraleigh works primarily in the medium of paint, although she has exhibited artworks in a variety of additional mediums, including drawing and sculpture. The process of creating these painted works varies and often involves a balance between control and chance. One such process used by Fraleigh involves rendering the figures using a traditional approach, then placing the canvas horizontally, introducing the element of chance through pours of mediums over the surface of the painting.

Fraleigh has been described as a “painterly painter,” creating tactile and flowing surfaces in her paintings. Most of Fraleigh’s paintings are figurative, depicting forms that are often obscured by “brushy, smeared or poured areas of color” or exist in an abstract or flattened space. Fraleigh’s decisions regarding what to display and what to leave hidden both facilitates narrative and disrupts it. Heavily influenced by literature and narrative structure, narrative has become the focus of Fraleigh’s more recent bodies of work. Through a combination of representational figures and abstract elements, many of Fraleigh’s painting have touched upon autobiographical elements, while others have focused on moments of sexual and physical tension, violence and desire, and underlying themes of power, class, gender, and identity.

Fraleigh’s 2014 body of work, displayed in the show Ghosts in the Sunlight at the Inman Gallery, continues to explore many of the themes established in her earlier work. Further sharpening a feminist lens through the destruction and reinvention of traditionally male-dominated art historical narratives, in her recent paintings, Fraleigh “reconsiders the classic female nude by taking figures from Baroque and Rococo paintings and reexamining their surroundings, attire and gaze." By creating a new painted environment and context for the female figures, appropriated from old masterworks, Fraleigh gifts her female protagonists with a new identity and importance that is no longer dependent upon their objectification or submissiveness. These themes are also apparent in Fraleigh’s 2015 painting series Lost in the Light, wherein the female figure is not obscured by abstract forms, but is instead hidden by the cropping and positioning of the figures. These unconventional portraits show women turned away or otherwise cut off from view, hiding their identity and thwarting the desire of the viewer to see or know more.

In her essay on Fraleigh’s work, “Erotic Power and the Subversion of Myth,” feminist writer and educator Jennifer Tyburczy writes that Fraleigh’s work may be seen as a response to the prevalence of the eroticized female nude in art, as highlighted in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Tyburczy posits that Fraleigh’s work “takes the limitations of the archive, the museum, and the discipline of art history to task and exposes the structure and logic of these sites as social fields that manage the circulation of ideas and feelings on sexual display and spectatorship.” The subversion of the male gaze is a common theme in Fraleigh’s paintings, yet sexuality is never entirely absent in these works, and is explored alongside “other kinds of desire that can exist between women, like friendship, love, camaraderie, and tenderness.”

Connections have been drawn between the all-female communities and relationships present in Fraleigh’s artwork and the utopia depicted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel “Herland.” Of this connection, writer and curator Kelly Baum notes that, like the citizens of Gilman’s utopia, “the citizens of Fraleigh’s utopia prioritize exchange and sociability." By freeing her female protagonists of their original contexts, Fraleigh explores not only how women relate and interact with one another and the environments they reside in, individually or in groups, but also the roles women play in an artistic space.

Fraleigh is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, TX.

Other media

Lost in the Light is a book collaboration between Fraleigh and writer Jen Werner on the occasion of Fraleigh's solo exhibition at the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY.

Awards and recognition

Fraleigh has been awarded numerous grants, residencies, and other recognitions, such as the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship; the CORE Artist in Residence Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the Eliza Randall Prize at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the CACHH, Individual Artist Grant Fellowship, Houston, TX; the Faculty Research and Development Grant at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA; Artist in Residence at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Artist in Residence at Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Artist in Residence at Can Serrat, El Bruc, Spain; Artist in Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX (deferred); and studio membership at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY. Fraleigh was also nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award as well as the Louis Comfort Tiffany grant.

Teaching and lecturing

Fraleigh’s visiting artist and lecturing experience includes universities, organizations, and institutions such as Lehman College, Bronx, NY; Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA; University of Houston, Houston, TX; Rice University, Houston, TX; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; NPR, www.kcur.org, Kansas City, MO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Moravian College, Bethlehem PA; Webster University, St. Louis, MO; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX; Bard College, Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA; Glassell School of Art, Houston, TX; and a panel discussion with Dana FriisHansen and Christopher French at the Inman Gallery, Houston, TX.

Collections

Selected solo exhibitions

2015

2014

2011

2008

2007

2006

2005

Selected group exhibitions

2016

2015

2014

2013

2011-12

2009-10

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2002-03