Angela Fraleigh

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Angela Fraleigh (born 1976) is a contemporary American artist. Her oil and mixed media paintings explore themes such as gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics, in a style that weaves together realism, abstraction, and classical influences.

Biography and education[]

Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural Hyde Park, New York where she attended Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School.^[1] She later received her BFA in painting from Boston University, where she graduated magna cum laude, and her MFA in painting from the Yale University School of Art.^[2][3] Fraleigh is an associate professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department. She currently resides and works in New York, NY, and Allentown, PA, where she lives with her husband, artist Wesley Heiss, and their daughters, Tuesday and Sagan.^[4]

Work[]

Fraleigh works primarily in the medium of paint, although she has exhibited artworks in a variety of additional mediums, including drawing and sculpture. The process of creating these painted works varies and often involves a balance between control and chance. One such process used by Fraleigh involves rendering the figures using a traditional approach, then placing the canvas horizontally, introducing the element of chance through pours of mediums over the surface of the painting.^[5]

Fraleigh has been described as a "Artistic painter," creating tactile and flowing surfaces in her paintings. Most of Fraleigh's paintings are figurative, depicting forms that are often obscured.^[6]

In her essay on Fraleigh's work, "Erotic Power and the Subversion of Myth," feminist writer and educator Jennifer Tyburczy writes that Fraleigh's work may be seen as a response to the prevalence of the eroticized female nude in art.^[7]" The subversion of the male gaze is a common theme in Fraleigh's paintings, yet sexuality is never entirely absent in these works, and is explored alongside "other kinds of desire that can exist between women, like friendship, love, camaraderie, and tenderness.^[8]"

Connections have been drawn between the all-female communities and relationships present in Fraleigh's artwork and the utopia depicted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 novel "Herland." Of this connection, writer and curator Kelly Baum notes that, like the citizens of Gilman's utopia, "the citizens of Fraleigh's utopia prioritize exchange and sociability.^[9]

References[]