John Frame

He has two siblings, Robert Wayne Frame (born 1931) and Phyllis Louise Frame Runyon (born 1943).

John Fayette Frame (born November 27, 1950) is an American sculptor, photographer, composer and filmmaker.

After his graduation from the Colton School District, he attended San Diego State University from 1968 to 1969 and then left Southern California.

During the following four years, he traveled through Europe and North America.

He held multiple jobs including assistant manager of a discount department store, gas station attendant, bookstore employee, dishwasher, library assistant, and construction worker.

From 1970 to 1971 he was employed by the state psychiatric hospital of New Hampshire as a psychiatric aide for the criminally insane.

Frame spent much of the 1970s studying a variety of art forms, including dance, theater, and literature.

After college, he began creating his own work, experimenting with drawing, painting, and printmaking before coming to sculpture.

He returned to Southern California in 1972 and completed an undergraduate degree in English at San Diego State University in 1975.

In 1972 he met Laura Lynn Dierker and they were married in 1977.

From 1979 to 1980, Frame attended the Claremont Graduate School, where he was an assistant in the printmaking department and foreman in the wood shop.

He graduated with an MFA.

He has been working as an artist in California since the early 1980s.

Frame has been given Grants and Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He has participated in group exhibitions around the world and has had major solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

In 1980, John and Laura Frame purchased their first home in Wrightwood, California where Laura had obtained a teaching position in the local elementary school.

At the same time John, along with three fellow artists, (Randall Lavender, Eve Steele, and Lynn Roylance) leased a 14,000 sqft building in downtown Los Angeles, known as the Firestone building, and began converting it to artists' studios.

Although this project was never completed, it became the first artist-in-residence complex to come under the Los Angeles live/work residency ordinance for artists.

Frame’s studio was located there from 1980 until 1991.

They have three children: Katherine Lynn (born 1981), Ashley Fayette (born 1985), and Lilian M. (born 1987).

His sculptural output increased between 1984 and 1990.

From 1992 until 2001 the artist's primary studio was located in the Santa Fe art colony in downtown Los Angeles.

He also maintained a small working studio at his home in Wrightwood.

During the years at the Santa Fe colony, his studio became a focal point for many of the figurative artists working in the Los Angeles area including Jim Doolan, Lauren Richardson, Jon Swihart, Peter Zokosky, Enjeong Noh, Brian Apthorp, F. Scott Hess, Cecilia Miguez, Ken Jones, Wes Christensen, Luis Serrano, Stephen Douglas and Stephen Dean Moore, among many others.

The Los Angeles drawing group met in his studio on a weekly basis between 1992 and 2001 to draw from live models.

Frame also originated the Los Angeles collaborative group known as the Bastards.This group consisted of Frame, Jon Swihart, Steve Galloway, Michael C. McMillan, F. Scott Hess and Peter Zokosky.

The Bastards completed more than 60 collaborative works and had two exhibitions, one at Hunsaker/Schlesinger gallery in Los Angeles and one at the Davidson gallery in Seattle, Washington.

In 2001, Frame closed his studio in the Santa Fe art gallery and moved full-time to Wrightwood, where he continues to live and work.

(To Hear the Sirens' Song and Live, the earliest work appearing in his 2005 retrospective show, was created in 1980.)

Although Frame received an MFA, he had no formal training in sculpture.

His sculptural works were initially roughly-hewn, somewhat coarse studies of the human form.

Though the refinement of his technical skill is evident in the stylistic changes in his work over the years, he has remained primarily a figurative sculptor with a humanistic, expressionist bent.

His work draws on a tradition of fragmented figuration that dates back to the Renaissance and is visible in works of Rodin, Brancusi, and Giacometti.

This focus represents a conscious departure from the abstract and conceptualist art that was popular when he attended graduate school and that has continued to dominate from an academic point of view.

Instead, in addition to the Renaissance, Frame's work has drawn from older traditions, including Greek tragedy and medieval art and spiritual practice (altarpieces, reliquary, morality plays, Italian Commedia dell'arte, and hagiography).

After five years of preparation, Part One of "The Tale of the Crippled Boy", a sweeping project incorporating sculpture, photography, installation, music and film, premiered at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in March 2011.

Frame was born in Colton, California.

His father, Rudolph Randolph Frame, had only a third-grade education and was a welder and sheet metal worker for the Santa Fe Railway.

His mother, Mildred Louise Frame (née Jones) was a cook in a local middle school.

Critics have noted other diverse echoes and influences in Frame's work, including 19th century allegorical statuary, Black Forest Carvings, aboriginal fetish figures romanesque and gothic effigies, American Arts and Crafts, and cubism His work has been noted to have commonalities with that of Joseph Cornell, H.C. Westermann, Michael McMillen, and Stephen DeStaebler