BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will present a free talk by artist Natalie Frank and curator Elissa Watters on Thursday, Jan. 20, at 7 p.m., via Zoom and Facebook Live. Register at brattleboromuseum.org.
Frank and Watters will discuss the BMAC exhibit, “Natalie Frank: Painting with Paper,” which presents work that Frank produced with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2019–20. The exhibit is on view at BMAC through Feb. 13.
Frank worked with wet pigmented cotton and linen paper pulp to create portraits of imagined female figures, each accompanied by an animal.
“Natalie Frank's work directly addresses the perception of women,” Watters said in a news release. “By pairing women with animals, she's playing on traditional portrayals of women as domestic but also as wild. I hope viewers will come away thinking about how women have traditionally been represented and what this work means in our current moment, especially around the #MeToo movement.”
Frank is a multimedia artist whose work explores contemporary discourse on feminism, sexuality, and violence. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She has illustrated five books of fairy tales, and she served as artistic director for Ballet Austin's commissioned work “Grimm Tales,” which won seven (1)Austin Critics Table Awards.
Watters has served as a guest curator at the Williams College Museum of Art and as the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is currently a Ph.D. student in art history at the University of Southern California.