Billy Gerard Frank

About

ARTIST STATEMENT

Colonial Ruins No.1 (2019)
This work along with Love Insouciance No.1 (2019) are a part of an accompanying collage of Frank’s autobiographical de-construction and re-positioning of memory from his father’s life in his short film, Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap, shown in Venice’s Biennale Arte in 2019. The body of work paired with the film offers multiple compelling vignettes, forms, and potentialities of narratives that ponder themes of exile, migration, colonialism, and sexuality. Frank places his audience in his father’s suitcase, sifting through his father’s maps, letters, stamps, and various mementos that served as a documentation for his family’s migration to America and the broader identification and implications of the Empire Windrush generation within his work. Frank’s placement of a burnt catholic prayer book, plantation ruins, and a gold mirror echoes the creation of his own temporality and poetic liberty that relentlessly confronts and entangles Frank’s construction of home and his interrogation of colonial, ancestral and personal memory.

Love Insouciance No.1 (2019)
This work along with Colonial Ruins No.1 (2019) are a part of an accompanying collage of Frank’s autobiographical de-construction and re-positioning of memory from his father’s life in his short film, Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap, shown in Venice’s Biennale Arte in 2019. The body of work paired with the film offers multiple compelling vignettes, forms, and potentialities of narratives that ponder themes of exile, migration, colonialism, and sexuality. Frank places his audience in his father’s suitcase, sifting through his father’s maps, letters, stamps, and various mementos that served as a documentation for his family’s migration to America and the broader identification and implications of the Empire Windrush generation within his work. The images from his father’s suitcase, the hand-stitching covering the canvas’s body are homages remembering his father’s skill of hand-stitching sails and building boats while simultaneously constructing Frank’s artistic spine of loss, grief, displacement, and longing in his familial and personal experience with diaspora, colonial past, and estrangement.

BIO

Billy Gerard Frank, born in Grenada, West Indies, is an Artist, Filmmaker, Production Designer, Educator, and founder of Nova Frontier Film Festival & Lab, which showcases and incubates the works of filmmakers and artists from and about the Global African Diaspora, The Middle East, Latin America. He is also a Lecturer in Directing and Design in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and has lectured at universities like NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and York University. He is one of the artists in the collective representing Grenada in the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and also represented the island at 58th La Biennale di Venezia (2019).

Frank’s research-based practices interrogate issues dealing with migration, race, exile, global politics, post-colonial, and queer decoloniality, challenging normative discourses around them. His mix-media artworks and films have been exhibited and screened in group and solo shows in museums and institutions like Brooklyn Museum (2020); Yale, and international film festivals like the Berlinale, and Sundance, and is also in several private collections and institutions like the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design, among others.

He moved to London as a teenager, where he began painting and exploring experimental video art and installation before moving to New York to pursue further studies in studio art at ateliers like The Art Students League of New York, and The National Academy of Fine Arts and studied under the American abstract expressionist and realist painter John Hultberg, and was John’s studio assistant for 5 years where he was introduced to artists like Robert Rauschenberg. He continued his studies in filmmaking and media arts at The New School for Social Research.