Ke Francis

Ke Francis was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945.  He studied at the Memphis Academy of Arts from 1964 to 1967 and earned his B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1969. Francis works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking (particularly woodcuts), and photography, and often combines several media in a single installation. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. His work has been exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. His profoundly narrative works seem to translate the Southern oral tradition into visual terms. In 1980 Francis began working on the “Reconstruction” series, which depicts the destruction wrought by tornadoes and the rebuilding that goes on afterward. His idiosyncratic style – part Cubist, part “primitive” – and his particular vocabulary of images, including the circular saw, combine to create quirky yet heroic paeans to the human spirit.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.