The Impressive Leona Pierce....

I don’t know about you, but researching printmakers as I have over the last year and a half, I sometimes come across people that have been little-known about, or maybe only locally to their own circle. It is a shame that one finds good work and realizes their estates may controlled by galleries or relatives that don’t know what to do with their relative’s work after they’ve passed. I don’t mean to suggest either situation is the case with Leona Pierce’s work. In fact, she did enjoy some recognition for her own art during her lifetime, and in collaboration with her artist-husband, Antonio Frasconi, who I recently reviewed here at That’s Inked Up. Still, I am discouraged when, I see good work, and there is little written about the artist. In this case, Pierce being a woman, and I am not getting on a band wagon about under-recognized women arists, BUT there has been a pre-ponderance for women artists to be given the slight. I hope this article will give her a little more recognition and that people will seek out her work.

Leona Pierce (1921-2002), was a painter, printmaker, textile artist, and teacher. She was born in Santa Barbara, California and later she moved to New York City. Her goal was to study at the Art Students’ League, which she did,  and later she pursued her studies at the New School.  Pierce studied with famed artists Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis. Some of her work reflects their sense of line and color.

While studying at the Art Student’s League, Pierce met artist Antonio Frasconi. They  married in 1951 and began a family. Soon after the birth of their second son, the couple settled in Norwalk, Connecticut where they remained until their deaths in 2002 (Leona) and 2013 (Frasconi), respectively. The Frasconis liked the quiet of Connecticut and  found it a good place to raise their two sons, Pablo and Miguel.  Pierce and Frasconi each continued to pursue their own art and teaching careers, amassing excellent credentials and publishing and illustrating children’s books. 

Pierce became established as an artist and developed an exhibition history with her woodcuts and hand printed textiles. She is probably best known for her bright and colorful woodcuts of children at play. The sense of child-like wonder and funky angles in her prints resemble the work of New York artist/printmaker Irving Amen. Her colors were lively and carefully balanced. I enjoy her lines and playfulness of the children as they play marbles or hide and seek.

Impressively, Pierce’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Side note* Pierce’s and Frasconi’s sons have both continued in the arts; Pablo is an award-winning independent filmmaker who resides in Santa Barabara, CA, and Miguel is an experimental electronic musician. Surely their parents instilled in them an artistic spark from which they’ve continued to explore their own creativity.

The Incredible Antonio Frasconi

Antonio Frasconi was born in 1919 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but grew up   in Uruguay's capital, Montevideo, Uruguay, by parents of Italian   decent.  As a young boy, by the age of 12 he was already making images. He started out making copies of Mickey Mouse, but soon afterward he learned about printing and he drew political cartoons for newspapers.He was attracted to making multiple image so he could afford to keep his prices reasonable.

 

Frasconi loved Paul Gauguin's colorful work and le was enamored of American jazz music. In 1945, at the end of World War II, he moved to the United States and worked for a short time as a gardener at the Santa Barbara Museum of art. Soon afterward he earned a scholarship to attend the art Student's League in new York City. From there, he went to study at the New School of Research.

"For me, New York City was a place for living and learning the good and the bad," he said. In the early '50s, he met and married fellow artist Leona Pierce, who had also studied at the Art Students' League. The Frasconis left New York City in 1957, moving to the more sedate and peaceful Norwalk, after the birth of their second son, Miguel. Frasconi's sons are also artists: Miguel is a composer and glass harmonica musician, and Pablo, is a filmmaker, whose work includes a 1985 film, called "The Woodcuts of Antonio Frasconi." 

By the 1950’s, Frasconi was recognized as one of America’s foremost pintmakers. His woodcuts are concerned with social and political issues for a long time. His bold and forceful images addressed the atrocities of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. One of his greatest and most personal projects was a series of prints called Los Desparacidos, or the Disappeared. It was about the thousands of men and women who had been victims of the brutal dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. This project further  fueled his interest to pursue making images about social protest and he continued to do so. Sometimes brutal in their clarity or making a quiet but pointed comment on the plight of migrant workers toiling day and night to bring in the crops, Frasconi was not shy when it came to his opinions.

Antonio Frasconi, remained a resident of Norwalk, still printmaking. His studio overlooked one of the beautiful coastal salt marshes in Norwalk, Connecticut, and captured the patterns and colors of the grasses and estuaries, the tidal flats, the waterfowl and flocks of migratory birds, and the sky. 

Frasconi's color combinations are like watching music, they are at times jazzy, vibrant, then muted. Later in his career, he became closely in tune with Nature and its ebb and flow of the tides,  seasonal color changes and nuances of the Norwalk landscape.

As an educator, he taught art at School of Art and Design at SUNY Purchase for 35 years. Frasconi also taught art at the Rowayton Art Center in the 1960s. By then, he was a well- established graphic artist, whose prints were a recognizable visual commentary for contemporary political and social issues.One of Frasconi's former students, Norwalk resident Virginia Bates,  said of his courses, "It was wonderful. It was the most stimulating class I ever took."

For the past 50 years or so, the landscape around Frasconi's home in Norwalk's Village Creek community, have found their place amongst the artist's prints. The print to the right here represents his observations well. Men are quietly going about their business, hoping their efforts will prove fruitful.... As to why he was attracted to woodcuts, Frasconi said it was difficult to answer. His approach to making prints was always by instinct more organic and painterly. The artist said his later work glorifies the landscape, yet he feels the encroachment of development and time changing the natural surroundings to something more suburban.

One understands he means that twofold, where the natural environment is lovely and peaceful, but the mark of man is inescapable. Kirk said that although Frasconi's earlier body of work is known for its political commentary, his most recent works depict more peaceful themes of nature. Filled with beauty and tranquility, the prints convey marshlands and tidal rivers as viewed from his home."They depict the wetlands of South Norwalk, a stone's throw from his studio windows, as they merge into the distance with the waters of Long Island Sound. This scene is always transforming, and the prints on view change with the seasons as the migrating birds fly across these landscapes/seascapes.

Awards and Accolades:

Art Student’s league – 1945

Guggenheim Foundation award – 1952
U.S. postage stamp  - 1963, honoring the centennial of the National Arts and Sciences

Represented Uuguay at the 1968 Venice Biennale
Distinguished teaching Professor of Visual Arts at SUNY, Purchase – 1982

Illustrator and designer of over 100 children’s books

Artwork published in magazines, a and various album covers.
Artwork in cluded in the follwoing public collections:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institute