Cianne Fragione (born 1952) is an American-born Italian abstract artist based in Washington, D.C. She is known for her mixed-media works that incorporate found objects and textiles with heavily layered oil paint and collage. She can be found in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University, and Georgetown College.
Early life and education
Fragione was born in Hartford, Connecticut into a community composed chiefly of Sicilian immigrant families. She grew up in a large multigenerational household; raised by a mother from Turin, Italy and a father from Sicily, she has credited her upbringing for developing an appreciation for the religious culture, symbols, and landscapes of Southern Italy.
Fragione's career in the arts began as a contemporary dancer with P. Stone Dance Company in Hartford, Connecticut and later the Hartford Ballet Company, continuing into other forms of dance, a practice that continues to drive her art: "The artist doesn't explicitly represent dancing, but there's motion in the loose gestures drawn with pencil and crayon or incised into pigment." In 1981 she graduated from Goddard College with a B.F.A. in painting and mixed media. In 1987 she received her M.F.A. in Painting/Mixed Media at John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts, Berkeley, CA where her artistic advisor/mentor was Jay DeFeo. While at JFK, she was invited to be a guest graduate student at The University of California, Berkeley, where she studied under Brian Wall and Anna Valentina-Murch. As a graduate student she also had tutorials with Manuel Neri at The University of California, Davis and Frank Lobdell at Stanford University.
Career
As Fragione moved from dance to the visual arts, she maintained a sensibility for rhythm and gesture: "The mark, as Fragione understands it, fulfills the way in which, as an artist, she uses her body. It is naturally generative. Creation arises from movement." In 2003, she presented her series of 14 pieces, No Greater Love: Stations of the Cross From a Woman’s Perspective, at the Indianapolis Art Center in a group exhibition on the intersection of religion and politics. Assembling debris from a Catholic church being renovated in Louisville, Kentucky, Fragione reinterpreted the well-known motif of Christ's execution through the eyes of the women who knew him. Her use of old newspapers, vintage textiles, photographs and other fragments frames the narrative as one consisting of personal relationships rather than abstract ideals.
Her work has been exhibited over the US and Italy in numerous independent galleries, as well as in public institutions like the Textile Museum, and the Katzen Art Center.
Style and influences
Fragione's work draws from a wide variety of influences from Renaissance artists like Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Agnolo Bronzino to twentieth-century artists like John Singer Sargent, Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell. Her interactions with Bay Area artists also imbued her paintings with a strong reliance on gesture and natural color. Fragione is often compared to Twombly due to her use of collage, scrawling lines, fragmented words and inspiration from antiquity, however she maintains that her work is thematically different: "He's older than me, but I came to this by another path," she said in an interview in 2019. Earlier in her career, Fragione switched between painting and assemblage, but since the late 1990's she has developed the two together into a fully idiosyncratic style of labor-intensive paintings with highly textured surfaces. Her piece Reliquary, for example, is a wall-mounted assemblage layered with items that suggest daily life like letters, gloves, beads, ceramic and marble shards, buttons, and coins. Coated with white oil paint, this work exemplifies the synthesis of painting and assemblage create layers of meaning.
Exhibitions
Selected solo exhibitions
1981 Artisan Gallery, Paintings, Burlington, VT
1982 Tasha Art Gallery, Paintings, Sonoma, CA
1985 Site-specific installation, Dance in Metal, Walnut Creek, CA
1988 Fiberworks Gallery, Paintings, Berkeley, CA
1992 Gallery Arcade, Recent Paintings, Oakland, CA
1994 Merced County Regional Arts Council Gallery, By Any Other Name, Merced, CA
1995 Instituti Italiano di Cultura, Paintings, San Francisco
1999 Wingspread Gallery, The Lady and the Stone, Northeast Harbor, ME
1999 Swanson Cralle East Market Gallery, Recent Paintings, Louisville, KY 1996 Bradford Gallery, Paintings, San Anselmo, CA