Jennifer Frudakis - Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art

Selected Public Sculpture
EvAngelos W. Frudakis
Icarus and Daedalus, fourteen-foot bronze fountain, Little Rock, AR
John F. Kennedy, over life-sized bronze memorial bust, Atlantic City, NJ;
Guaymas, Mexico; Nashua, NH
Minute Man, nine-foot bronze, National Guard Readiness Center,
Arlington, VA
Minute Man, six-foot bronze, National Guard Building, Washington, D.C.
Naiad Fountain, seven-foot bronze, Brookgreen Gardens, NC
The Signer, twelve-foot bronze, Independence National Historical Park,
Philadelphia, PA
Welcome Fountain, seven-foot bronze, The Rittenhouse Hotel,
Philadelphia, PA
Acknowledgment
The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art is pleased to offer Frudakis: Two
Generations of Sculpture to our constituents at the Ligonier Valley Museum. This
exhibition was conceived in 2010 when SAMA worked with Jennifer Frudakis
and became acquainted with her father, EvAngelos Frudakis. After a lengthy
search, we elected to contract with Jennifer to create the Father Sean Sullivan
(Museum Founder and Trustee Emeritus) sculpture that is now permanently and
proudly displayed at the Loretto Museum. It was at that time that we learned
of the extraordinary artistic talent that ran through the Frudakis family lineage.
In this exhibition, you will be witness to strength, grace and elegance. For
example, look at the strong facial features in Zenos Frudakis’s General Eisenhower.
See the sinuous motion captured in EvAngelos Frudakis’s Naiad. Study the
elegance that emanates from Jennifer Frudakis’s Seahorse. These are the
characteristics of accomplished artists.
EvAngelos Frudakis, Naiad, 1999
The Frudakises are masters of their craft. Collectively, they display a disciplined attention to detail, skillful craftsmanship,
a strong commitment to excellence and God-given talent. The quality of their work cannot be denied. They are well
schooled and offer a depth of experience. Their portfolio of work is most impressive. Each has been recognized in their
own right and their contributions to their profession have garnered praise and prestige.
The Frudakis family crest must certainly contain a reference to sculpting. Their Greek heritage roots them in the style of
the Greek masters and provides a foundation in sculpting. However, they are not necessarily shackled to a single form. Their
education, experience and experimentation afford them a palette of traditional or contemporary approaches to the tasks at
hand.
Zenos Frudakis
Arnold Palmer and Bobby Jones, seven-foot bronzes, Golf Hall of
Fame, Atlanta, GA
Dream to Fly, twenty-one-foot bronze figure composition,
Colwick Office Complex, Cherry Hill, NJ
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., life-sized bronze, United States
Embassy, Pretoria, South Africa; King Center, Philadelphia,
PA; King Center, Erie, PA
Frank L. Rizzo, ten-foot bronze, MSB Plaza, Philadelphia, PA
Freedom, eight-by-twenty-foot bronze figure composition,
GlaxoSmithKline Corporate Headquarters, Philadelphia, PA
National Air Force Memorial Honor Guard, life-sized bronze figure
composition, Arlington, VA
This assemblage of fine art has been under the capable direction of Rosalie Frudakis and SAMA Curator for Visual Arts,
Dr. V. Scott Dimond, and I thank them for their work. Site Coordinator, Sommer Toffle, and the Museum staff have
helped with the exhibition process and program and I thank them for their efforts. It has been a pleasure to work with the
Frudakis family throughout the project.
G. Gary Moyer
Executive Director
DIRECTOR’S CIRCLE
Benzel’s Bretzel Bakery
Mr. and Mrs. William Benzel
The Donald & Sylvia Robinson Family Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. Harry McCreary
Mrs. Dorothea Nelson
Rev. Sean M. Sullivan, T.O.R.
Mrs. Mary Weidlein
MUSEUM ASSOCIATES
Jennifer Frudakis
Father Sean Sullivan, T.O.R., life-sized bronze bust, Southern Alleghenies
Museum of Art, Loretto, PA
History of the Negro Baseball League, six-by-eight-foot bronze bas relief,
Richard Stockton College, Abseacon, NJ
Horace Bryant, life-sized bronze bust, Carnegie Library, Atlantic City, NJ
The Legacy, twelve-foot stainless steel anniversary monument, The Press
of Atlantic City, Atlantic City, NJ
Ron Hextall, Dave Poulin, Dave Schultz, Bronze portrait and figure
sculptures, Philadelphia Flyers Hall of Fame, Philadelphia, PA
Tiger, life-size resin sculpture, Holy Family College, Philadelphia, PA
Conemaugh Health System
Franciscan Friars, T.O.R.
Mrs. Shari Polacek
EDUCATION SPONSORS
C&G Savings Bank
Central Pennsylvania Community Foundation
Hon. and Mrs. Timothy Creany
Davis Vision
Mr. and Mrs. Donald Devorris
Mr. and Mrs. John K. Duggan, Jr.
Harold & Betty Cottle Family Foundation
Highmark, Inc.
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Mrs. Shirley Pechter
EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Dr. and Mrs. Magdi Azer
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Sheetz
Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Wolf
Editor:
Travis Mearns
Printer:
Laurel Valley Graphics
Catalogue Design:
Color Scan LLC
© 2013 Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
This catalogue is published by the
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
Post Office Box Nine
Loretto, PA 15940
(814) 472-3920
Hours:
Tuesday through Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Weekends: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays
Admission is free
Cover:
EvAngelos Frudakis, The Signer, 1979
Bronze with marble base, 35" x 14"
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Ligonier Valley
August 16, 2013 through November 10, 2013
Curator’s
Statement
Zenos’s first major public monument was the life-sized group of an
elephant and boy, commissioned in the early 1980s by department
store mogul Stockton Strawbridge for the Burlington Mall in
Burlington, New Jersey. The centerpiece of a fountain, it has raised
tens of thousands of dollars each year in coins collected for special
needs children. Since then, Zenos has completed many additional
projects, including a number of over life-sized multifigure bronze
compositions such as Freedom (Philadelphia, PA), Dream to Fly
(Cherry Hill, NJ), and The National Air Force Memorial Honor Guard
(Arlington, VA).
Although uncommon, families of artists are not unprecedented in
American art. One has only to think of the famous Peale family of
the early nineteenth century or, closer to our own time, the Wyeths
of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. There are others as well, and it is
not unreasonable to assume that artistic talent involves a genetic
component of some kind. The Frudakis family of sculptors certainly
possesses such talent, but what sets them apart is a conscious striving
for excellence that has been conditioned by their experience as Greek
Americans. Reverence for the artistic legacy of ancient Greece
combined with a strong belief in the American Dream has led each
of them to excel in his or her own way. Confidence in their innate
gifts, hard work, and unwavering faith in the opportunities afforded
by life in America have enabled each of the Frudakises to claim a
place among the leading sculptors of the classical tradition.
In much of his work, action or the potential for action is the key
theme, whether it is expressed in the ebullient joy of Freedom and
Dream to Fly, or the tense readiness of the standard bearers that make
up The National Air Force Memorial Honor Guard. Zenos’s reverence
for the complex mechanism of the human body is a direct echo of his
ancient Greek forebears, yet his feeling for dynamic movement
belongs uniquely to the American twenty-first century.
Together with her brother, Tony, Jennifer Frudakis represents the
second generation of this remarkable family of sculptors. Like her
father and uncle, she too has made her way within the Greek-inspired
classical tradition. Yet her concerns as an environmentalist and a
personal inclination toward the lyrical and fantastic have made their
own distinct contribution to the family’s artistic legacy.
Their story begins with EvAngelos Frudakis, who at age 92 is the
family patriarch. The son of Greek immigrants, he was born in
Rains, Utah, a western boom town whose mines formed the first
rung on the ladder of success for many new arrivals. His early life
was defined by a series of moves from Utah, to Wyoming, Indiana,
and finally to New York City, interspersed by a couple of lengthy
stays in Greece. A childhood love of modeling and carving led
EvAngelos to dream of being an artist, and as a teen in New York,
he began to see that a life in the arts could be a reality.
Starting with a compassionate teacher who encouraged his efforts,
EvAngelos made his way to settlement house art classes and then
adult instruction with Lawrence Fearn, a visiting painter from New
Jersey. Fearn directed his young pupil to night classes at the BeauxArts Institute of Design, whose program of regular competitions
sharpened EvAngelos’s desire to win distinction for himself. Natural
talent and the drive to succeed led to scholarships at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with
Walker Hancock and Paul Manship, two of the country’s foremost
practitioners of modern classical sculpture. As winners of the Rome
Prize of the American Academy in Rome, they represented the
pinnacle of achievement in their chosen field. EvAngelos was
determined to meet their standard, and despite the interruption of
World War II, he set himself to attaining this ambitious goal.
Drafted in 1942, EvAngelos participated in the invasion of
Normandy and joined in the push toward Germany until he was
wounded in a V-2 rocket explosion in late September 1944. Sent
home, he spent a year recovering in
a military hospital. On being
discharged, he returned to the
Pennsylvania Academy and resumed
work. His sculpture began to win
prizes at the major exhibitions in
Philadelphia and New York and
in 1950, he at last obtained the
Rome Prize. Spending two years
as a Fellow of the American
Academy in Rome, he pursued a
course of independent study and
finalized his artistic vision. In all
his work thereafter, from his
portrait
commissions
and
medallic art to public monuments
such as the John F. Kennedy
Memorial (Atlantic City, NJ,
Nashua, NH, and Guaymas,
Mexico), Icarus and Daedalus
EvAngelos Frudakis, Pegasus, 1994
(Little
Rock,
AR),
The
C ATA L O G U E
Zenos Frudakis, Milton and Catherine Hershey, 2010
Minuteman (Arlington, VA and Washington, DC) and The Signer
(Philadelphia, PA), EvAngelos has striven to express his own poetic
humanism through the discipline and beauty of the ancient Greek
ideal. This approach is the cornerstone of his teaching philosophy,
and has found sympathetic echoes in the work of his children and that
of his brother Zenos as well.
This is not to say that all of the Frudakises embrace the same artistic
outlook. Where EvAngelos has consciously invested his subjects with
the dignity and timeless poise that are the hallmarks of classical
Greece, Zenos injects his work with a certain here-and-now vitality
that instantly appeals to the viewer. Although his sculpture is based
on the same principles of fidelity to nature and a thorough knowledge
of classical exemplars, it is also informed by an awareness of
contemporary trends that gives it the stamp and character of its own
time.
Jennifer was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1961. Three years
afterward, her family moved briefly to Vermont, where Jennifer
remembers rolling clay for her father’s monumental Icarus and
Daedalus group. Her mother, a talented painter and a graduate of the
Pennsylvania Academy as well, created moody, dreamlike landscapes
which hung in her parents’ shared studio space. It was perhaps a
foregone conclusion that Jennifer would follow in their footsteps, and
at the age of twelve she began taking adult art courses and entering
her work in community art exhibitions. After graduating high school,
she attended the Pennsylvania Academy and completed a four-year
course of study. To this she added four more years of advanced classes
with her father in his own school, located on Chestnut Street in
Philadelphia.
While completing her training with EvAngelos, Jennifer began
showing at exhibitions of the Allied Artists of America and the
National Academy of Design, where she won consecutive awards for
her portrait work. At the age of 34, she received her first significant
public commission, a twelve-foot high stainless steel piece to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Atlantic City Press.
Depicting a pair of monumental hands passing a torch, The Legacy
(Atlantic City, NJ) was the first of a series of public projects for several
colleges and community institutions in the Mid-Atlantic region.
These include a six-by-eight foot bronze bas relief of the History of the
Born some 30 years later than EvAngelos, Zenos is a son of his father’s
second marriage. Growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia; and Gary,
Indiana; he attended the Greek Orthodox Church in Wheeling. The
art in that church, particularly the icon paintings, was an early
inspiration. Zenos was also aware that he had an older brother who
was a professional sculptor. Fond of drawing, he was intrigued by the
notion that one could pursue art for a living. When EvAngelos and
his brother Michael, an architect, came to Gary to attend their father
in the hospital, Zenos spent all night talking with EvAngelos about
art. His course, it seemed, was set.
In 1973, Zenos enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine
Arts as a scholarship student. He began to spend more time with
EvAngelos, visiting his studio and learning the ins and outs of a career
in sculpture. A few years later, he undertook formal study with his
brother before going on to undergraduate and graduate work in fine
arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Like EvAngelos, Zenos was
driven to excel. He determined to earn or win all the distinctions he
could, especially election to the National Academy of Design and the
National Sculpture Society. Both of these goals he attained early in his
career, along with many prizes and awards for his sculpture.
Jennifer Frudakis
Seahorse, 2013
EvAngelos Frudakis, PA Mountain Lion, 1969
Zenos Frudakis, General Eisenhower, 2012
Negro Baseball League for Sand Castle Stadium (Atlantic City, NJ;
reinstalled at Richard Stockton College, Abseacon, NJ), a life-sized
Tiger for Holy Family College (Philadelphia, PA), and an architectural
relief of a Cougar for Kean University (Union, NJ).
Although the tiger and cougar pieces represent their respective schools’
mascots, they underscore the fact that Jennifer is drawn to animal
subjects in particular. Eagles, gazelles, and even the fragile seahorse
have all come under her scrutiny as she works to call attention to the
imperiled world in which these animals live. At the same time, a
personal repertory of mythical nature-guardians including gargoyles,
green men, and mermaids frequently surfaces in her noncommissioned
work, reflecting the sculptor’s modern-day invocation of these
legendary figures as protectors of the environment.
The Greek spirit in art seems to draw little distinction between
imaginary subjects and real ones, so long as they are well observed and
truthfully expressed. Each of the Frudakises has striven to become a
master of technique while pursuing his or her own vision of what good
sculpture should embody. Highly esteemed in ancient Greece, the
concept of individual excellence has been not only encouraged, but
actively fostered in America, where we subscribe to the belief that hard
work and merit is the key to success. Although our present climate of
postmodern cynicism tends to cast doubt on this hopeful idea, we have
only to examine the Frudakises’ story –and their art– to know that
worthy dreams may still be realized in this country.
V. Scott Dimond
May 2013
EvAngelos Frudakis, Bison, 1980
EvAngelos Frudakis [American, b. 1921]
Bison, 1980
Bronze with marble base, 7” x 12”
Zenos Frudakis [American, b. 1951]
Arnold Palmer, 1992
Bronze, 8” h.
Naiad, 1999
Bronze with carved stone base, 32” x 12”
Contemplation, 1982
Bronze, 10” x 8”
PA Mountain Lion, 1969
Bronze with marble base, 11” x 13”
Freedom, 1998
Bronze, 8” x 12”
Pegasus, 1994
Bronze, 15” x 12”
The Signer, 1979
Bronze with marble base, 35” x 14”
Jennifer Frudakis [American, b. 1961]
Dove, 2012
Bronze, 16” x 15”
Gazelle, 2013
Bonded bronze [sold in bronze], 14” x 10”
Rachel Carson, 2013
Bonded bronze [sold in bronze], 27” x 21”
Resurgence, 1997
Oil on panel and 24K gold leaf, 18” x 32”
Seahorse, 2013
Bronze, 18” x 10”
Zenos Frudakis, Freedom, 1998
General Eisenhower, 2012
Bonded bronze [sold in bronze],
25” x 19” x 9”
Milton and Catherine Hershey, 2010
Plaster [sold in bronze],
24” x 17” x 15”