Cianne Fragione

Cianne Fragione (born 1952) is an American abstract artist based in Washington, D.C. She is known for her mixed-media works that incorporate found objects and textiles with heavily layered oil paint and collage. She can be found in the permanent collections of Georgetown College and the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University.

Fragione was born in Hartford, Connecticut into a community composed chiefly of Sicilian immigrant families. Raised by a mother from Turin, Italy and a father from Sicily, she has credited her upbringing for developing an appreciation for the religious culture, symbols, and landscapes of Southern Italy.

Fragione's career in the arts began as a contemporary dancer with P. Stone Dance Company in Hartford, Connecticut and later the Hartford Ballet Company, continuing into other forms of dance, a practice that continues to drive her art: "The artist doesn't explicitly represent dancing, but there's motion in the loose gestures drawn with pencil and crayon or incised into pigment." After receiving a B.F.A. in painting and mixed media from Goddard College, she moved to California to attend John F. Kennedy University and study under iconic West Coast artists Jay DeFeo and Manuel Neri, in addition to Frank Lobdell. She was a guest graduate student at University of California, Berkeley where she studied with Brian Wall.

In 2003, she presented her series, No Greater Love: Stations of the Cross From a Woman’s Perspective at the Indianapolis Art Center in a group exhibition on the intersection of religion and politics. Assembling debris from a Catholic church being renovated in Louisville, Kentucky, Fragione counselled her own experience as an Italian-American Roman Catholic.

Her work has been exhibited over the US and Italy in numerous independent galleries, as well as public institutions like the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Textile Museum, and the Katzen Art Center.