Chawky Frenn


Chawky Frenn is an American artist, author, and art professor. He currently teaches art at George Mason University in northern Virginia. His highly realistic paintings have strong narrative social and political elements. Frenn is a former Fulbright Scholar, and currently resides in the Greater Washington, D.C. area.

Early life and education

Frenn immigrated to the United States in 1981 and lived for several years in Boston, where he studied art and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA, in 1985 and completed his MFA at Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, and at Temple Abroad in Rome, Italy, in 1988. He has taught art at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, MA; Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA; and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in Edinboro, PA. He is currently an Associate Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, where he received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2009.

Exhibitions

Frenn has exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and his work has been widely reviewed by major newspapers and significant art critics. His work has been exhibited at the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, PA, Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, CT, Erie Art Museum in Erie, PA, Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY, and the Sursock Museum in Beirut, Lebanon. Frenn's paintings are also in the permanent collection of The Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, CT and the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, OH.

Solo exhibitions

Frenn is the author of the following books
A New York Times review in 2001 described him as “a painter who has nailed down the figurative mode, and this accomplishment gives him the license to convey anything he wants, including the grand theme: the elusive meaning of human existence.”
A Washington Post review in 2004 added that Frenn is “an artist's artist.” In that same year, in discussing an exhibition of Frenn's works at Darmouth The Lebanon Daily Star newspaper noted that "you might think it would take a lot to upstage an artist like Damien Hirst, but earlier this year Chawky Frenn did so with ease."
American art critic Donald Kuspit wrote that “He constructs a spiritual space in which the contemporary public can feel emotionally at home, however troubling the emotions his imagery evokes in them.”
Washington Life Magazine described Frenn in 2009 as an "influential metro area visual artist."