Samples of Frank's work will be displayed at the June 26 party.

Frank Born was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas. In 1980 Born moved to San Francisco, where in 1985 he was the guest designer (with Daniel Friedlander) of the exhibition Art + Architecture + Landscape: The Clos Pegase Design Competition at SFMOMA. In recent years his paintings have been exhibited in Chicago, North Carolina, Texas, Colorado, Iowa and California, and he has traveled twice for solo exhibitions in Nagoya, Japan.
Throughout his artistic career Born has made two types of paintings. One is portraits, painted from direct observation, where the artist attempts to capture a measure of the model's character and actual presence. "I have always felt that by looking at a face and painting what I saw, I could capture a portion of the interior life we each possess," says Born. The other is narrative paintings, where according to the artist's statement, he starts with nothing in mind and the subject emerges as the work progresses.
The artist Bill Viola wrote to Frank Born about his work: "You work with making exterior appearances become the window to the interior realities we all must live with, while the formal aspects of the medium of painting becomes merely the vehicle for this, the true ground of the work."
In the Spring of 1996, after his youngest brother's death a year earlier, Frank returned to Port Arthur to help care for his father who was dying of cancer. The reunion of the family around these two events and the intimacy involved in caring for his father resulted in a series of paintings about family, relationship and loss. In response to this series one Japanese critic wrote: "He is not the kind of artist who studies the context of contemporary art and makes a work based on a calculation of how to succeed....The act of depicting the body that is a vessel of spirit helps heal the artist's self.... It is the fact that the work gives the audience a reason to see it when it has a strong internal motivation."