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In the Pond, 1997
Native-American abstract neo-expressionist painter, muralist, assemblage and found-object artist. Born in McMinnville, Oregon, the son of Myrtle Porter (1925 – 2000) and Frank E. Kowing Sr. (1923 – 1984). Frank Kowing Jr. was a member and elder of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde through his mother’s ancestry.
Frank Kowing Jr. attended McMinnville High School, graduating in 1962 and then Linfield College, graduating in 1966, one of the first students of the fledgling at department. He then did a stint in the U.S. Navy before traveling to the Netherlands, where he settled in Amsterdam and began his studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. There, he was a protege and student of Hans Hofmann (1880 – 1966). Upon his return to the United States, he was accepted into the master’s program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with two degrees, one in the arts and a fine arts degree in painting in 1973. During his time at the University of Pennsylvania he worked in the university museum as part of his graduate studies.
Not long after graduation, he moved to New York City where he became part of the Second Story Spring Street Society collective, which organized and operated one of the first fine art galleries on Spring Street in SoHo. During this period the gallery was reviewed and discussed in a number of prominent arts publications, including Artforum, Artnews, Arts Magazine, Cue, New York Magazine, etc. His 1975 exhibition at the Second Story Spring Street Society was reviewed in Artforum by Susan Heinemann, who remarked:
“Another instance of the current emphasis on physicality can be seen in Frank Kowing’s paintings. Here the stress is not on the objecthood of painting per se, but on the materiality of its construction. Combining an Abstract Expressionist way of working with collage techniques, Kowing remains close to his sources— Rauschenberg and Johns, Motherwell and maybe de Kooning. Jockey, for example, is literally a window. A green frame stenciled with the black letters jockey. Inside, on top, a wrapping of plastic occasionally painted on, sometimes folded back to expose the surface behind. Underneath this a string grid on which different fabrics are hung, some bulging forward, others puckering backward in space. The whole a kind of play on the traditional flatness of the picture surface.
The illusion of a shalt lowly overlapping Cubistic space is given a real dimension. Similarly Pearls for a Lovesick Eye builds its surface in material. Rectangles of fabric stitch a collage. Areas are painted in pastel hues, other pieces insist on their texture, carpet or foam, while a gloss of polyresin seals the whole. The framework is a traditional one for visual poetry. And in his announcement Kowing states, “I want to say something through the transposition of feelings into correlatives of line, color, texture . . . with implications of metaphor.” Yet I wonder if self-expression is possible within such an established format. Perhaps the lyricism one reads in this particular work derives more from what has become accepted as painterly sensibility.”
After time with other collectives in California, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., Kowing joined the Peace Corps., spending several years teaching children with developmental disabilities in Africa. After his return to the United States, he became a respected curator, settling in Silver Spring, Maryland, from where he would continue to paint and curate exhibitions. This included work for six years as the exhibition coordinator at Meridian House International in Washington, D.C, a not-for-profit conference center and museum, where he oversaw exhibitions of contemporary art from the Arabian Gulf in 1989 and the important exhibition “The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones” in 1994.
A lover of travel since his days in the Navy, Kowing visited many countries in southeast Asia during his time in Vietnam and continued to travel extensively during his service in the Peace Corps and beyond. In addition to his painting and assemblage work, in 1980 he collaborated with the widow of the painter and muralist Milton Osborne (1897 – 1972) to create new murals for the University of Pennsylvania’s Nittany Lion Inn.
Kowing’s life, like those of so many artists, was tinged with pain and suffering, as was noted by Friderike Heuer in 2022: “[Kowing] was estranged from his parents, as well as from a son from an early relationship. He lost two beloved wives to death from diseases. He lost his health to a series of grave accidents and subsequent surgeries, the ravages of un-diagnosed Lyme disease and increased pain management by self-medicating with alcohol. The zest for life, the passion for nature – mountain-climbing in particular, again and again, all over the world – the longing for the freedom of high altitudes of any kind, was in increasing tension with the paralysis induced by physical pain and emotional depression… [but] Kowing knew how to tell stories, fully aware that they were likely shared in some, even many, details at levels that transcend our roles in life.”
As a painter, Kowing was known during the early part of his career for impressionist paintings, but by the early 1970s, his work took a new turn, and moved into new-expressionism with artworks that included elements of political and social commentary. His later paintings and assemblages, which included found-objects, would include elements of all these types.
Frank Kowing himself remarked in 2011 on his art-creating philosophy: “Art-making embodies our private struggles with the meaning of life, the relationship between humanity and nature. In a time when our ability to comprehend reality is becoming more and more blurred by our inability to abstract meaning, the visionary abstractionist of natural phenomena represents a way of making art that is inherent and primordial…Through use of organic shapes and a chaotic vocabulary, it is possible to awaken the viewer’s own private demons.”
Though there are undoubtedly other exhibitions in which Kowing participated, those presently known include the following: Linfield College, Salem, OR, 1965, 1966 (solo); American Baptist College’s Art Competition Traveling Exhibition, Linfield College (and elsewhere), 1966; Zoller Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, State College, PA, 1973; Second Story Spring Street Society, New York, NY, 1974-76 (group and solos); Gallery Doshi, Philadelphia, PA, 1979 (solo); Nouveau International Arts Museum and Gallery, Washington, D.C., 1990; Portfolio Gallery at VisArts, Rockville, MD, 2011; The Linfield Gallery at the James F. Miller Fine Arts Center, Linfield College, Salem, OR, 2022 (retrospective).
Kowing’s works are known to be held in the following public institutions: Nittany Lion Inn, University of Pennsylvania, State College, PA; The Linfield Gallery at the James F. Miller Fine Arts Center, Linfield College, Salem, OR. The majority of his works reside in private collections throughout the United States.