John Frame

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. 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. He has two siblings, Robert Wayne Frame (born 1931) and Phyllis Louise Frame Runyon (born 1943). 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. 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. They have three children: Katherine Lynn (born 1981), Ashley Fayette (born 1985), and Lilian M. (born 1987). 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. 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. 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.

• Illustration — O-man from "The Tale of the Crippled Boy," 2011 In 2005, Frame began to take his work in a new direction. That year, he conceived and began to execute the work that would form his largest exhibition to date. (The work, entitled The Tale of the Crippled Boy: Three Fragments of a Lost Tale was exhibited at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens from March–June 2011.) The installation is unique in the artist's career in that it includes not only thirty-five pieces of sculpture but also sets, photography and animated vignettes, all based around an eclectic cast of sculpted characters, most of whom are fully articulated, with moving fingers, bodies, and jaws. The exhibition also includes an 8-minute documentary on the artist's process, directed by filmmaker Johnny Coffeen. This departure from Frame's past work was not totally unanticipated; David Pagel, in a review of the artist's 2005 retrospective, noted “If John Frame were in the movie business, he would be a costume designer, stylist, set decorator, prop master, lighting specialist, writer, director, editor, producer, agent and publicist all rolled into one do it yourself lover of every little detail of every little job.” And, in fact, Frame has completed this project (including music, lighting, and photography) with only the help of a few friends and family members. The work also shares thematic consistency with the artist's previous work, according to curators Kevin Murphy and Jessica Todd Smith, who state, “In keeping with the work John Frame has created throughout his career, the tale and the art associated with it evoke universal human themes—the nature of good and evil, the inevitability of death, and the struggle to find meaning in life—but always in a connotative rather than denotative manner.” The artist anticipates continuing the project, eventually producing a full-length film.

In 2018, Frame served as the Production Designer for the Chicago Lyric Opera production of Faust, which ran from March 3 - March 31. The production was in tandem with the Portland Opera where Faust opened on June 8, 2018.

• 2012 Portland Art Museum, Stott Gallery, Portland, Oregon • 2011 The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California • 2005 Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California • 1999 Kohn/Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1996 Kohn/Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1993 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1992 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California • 1990 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1987 Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1984 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, California • 1983 Installation Gallery, San Diego, California • 1982 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, California • Mattingly Baker Gallery, Dallas, Texas • 1981 Francine Seders Gallery, Seattle, Washington

John Frame is recorded with the occupation photographer. Recorded as sculptor, photographer, composer, animator and artist.