Dana frankfort

For over two decades, Dana Frankfort (born 1971, Houston, TX) has explored the vexing periphery between language and sight by painting words. Rather than laying claim to the paintings, controlling their semiotic pulse, her words serve as the formal armature; they prop up, ventilate, and allow the many layers of paint to breathe. Imperatives, allusions, evocations—the words dissolve into a palimpsest of obscured serifs and stems, into color and form.

She has attended residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, Ox-Bow, and the MFAH Core Studio Art Program. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and others. Frankfort has received an Artadia grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Frankfort’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Rice University (Houston, TX), St. Edward’s University (Austin, TX), and The Jewish Museum (New York, NY). She received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Yale University.

Frankfort’s debut solo exhibition at Olympia took place in the winter of 2024 and was reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.