Cianne Fragione

American, b. 1952

BiographyCianne Fragione (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist. With roots in the San Francisco Bay Area Beat and Funk art milieus, over the past four decades she has developed her own process-oriented artistic vocabulary that crosses boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, and between object and image. A striking combination of oil paint, mixed-media materials, found objects, and textiles characterizes her signature style. Each piece, whether two- or three-dimensional, is built slowly over lengthy periods, becoming a dense synthesis of influences and personal perspectives, including mid-century gestural abstraction and the physical fluency of her early training as a professional dancer. While a sense of space and movement dominates her two-dimensional works, her assemblage pieces tend to be denser and more corporeal. Her most recent works respond to two collections of poems by Italian poet and writer Eugenio Montale: Mediterraneo and Ossi di Seppia.

Fragione received her MFA (1987) in Painting/Mixed Media at John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts, Berkeley, CA. During this time, she was a guest graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a fellowship that enabled her to work with artists associated with the beat and funk movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1981, she received her BFA from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt.

Fragione has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies. Her works are held in public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art MD; DC Commission Art Bank Collection; Art in Embassies Permanent Collection, U.S. State Department, Guadalajara, Mexico; St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, CA; Italian American Museum, D.C; Department of Special Collections, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, CA; Comune di Monasterace, Calabria, IT; among other museum and private collections.

Fragione lives and works in Washington DC.

Artist Statement:

“My current paintings, drawings, and assemblages respond to two collections of short poems by Eugenio Montale: Mediterraneo and Ossi di Seppia. I share some of Montale’s linguistic spirit, as my work draws upon similar types of formal motifs that refer to memories, traditions, and histories, both personal and cultural. A significant aspect of my current work is its ability to develop and express a vivid iconography of ordinary objects, thus reshaping everyday life with imagination, unpredictability, and sensitivity. This also encourages a fluidity of themes and imagery that overlap as they continue to reorganize themselves and open further avenues of exploration.

A combination of oil paint, and mixed medium materials, in conjunction with found objects and textiles, gives rise to graceful and rough transitions. Refined and scruffy surfaces evoke encrusted layers of time-laden structures and landscapes. Meanwhile, delicate drawn lines enlarge the surface narrative by creating open spatial fields. Collaged fragments add a sense of the figure, a human presence.

Built slowly, over lengthy periods, each work becomes a dense synthesis of influences and personal perspectives, including mid-twentieth-century gestural abstraction, my close connection to the expressive work of the San Francisco Bay Area Beat and Funk artists, and the physical fluency of my early training as a professional dancer. But unlike a performance, which is ephemeral, the canvas or sheet of paper has become the stage, the space in which movement is orchestrated and inscribed in durable, articulate form.”

Artist website

Person TypeArtist