Frances Stark

Frances Stark (born 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose work centers on the use and meaning of language, and the translation of this process into the creative act. She often works with carbon paper to hand-trace letters, words, and sentences from classic works by Emily Dickinson, Goethe, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and others to explore the voices and interior states of writers. She uses the hand-traced words. often in repetition, as visual motifs in drawings and collage compositions that reference a subject, mood, or another discipline, such as music, architecture, or philosophy. Her work had been exhibited internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the Performa 11 biennial, and the 54th Venice Biennale. Stark is also a writer of prose and poetry that has been published in various magazines, catalogues, and books.

Born in 1967 in Newport Beach, California, Frances Stark is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 1991 with a BA in Humanities, and from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1993 with a MFA. was formerly an Assistant Professor at University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts.

She is represented by Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, greengrassi gallery in London, and Marc Foxx Gallery in Los Angeles. Her artworks are included in public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, di Rosa, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, and Fonds Regional d'art Contemporain, Champagne-Ardenne.

My Best Thing (2011)

The feature-length video work My Best Thing, first presented at the 54th Venice Biennale, stems from an anonymous chat site Stark encountered online. The dialogues between Stark and her chat partners are represented by generalized, cartoon avatars that speak the chat transcripts. The subject matter of these chats range from art and the creative process, to sex and anonymity. The video’s form and content show how the new modes of online communication allow for both greater intimacy and anonymity, giving rise to new kinds of behaviors and relationships.

• 2015: Uh-Oh: Frances Stark 1991-2015, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California.
• 2010: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 2007: The Fall of Frances Stark, Van Abbemuseum, Eindoven, the Netherlands.

• "UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991-2015 - Hammer Museum". The Hammer Museum. Retrieved 2016-03-05. 
• "Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind". MIT List Visual Arts Center. Retrieved 2016-03-05. 
• "Van Abbemuseum - Pers / Press". www.vanabbe.nl. Retrieved 2016-03-05.