Frances Lee is an artist, educator and arts administrator.
Her artistic practice explores the symbolic language of images, materials and objects through the relationship between abstraction and storytelling.
Inspired by moral tensions in public space, civic discourse, and gender experience, her work explores how social forms are enacted and observed. With a focus in the disciplines of painting and sculpture, Lee’s artistic research asks how knowledge and communication are embodied in our social, personal and biological structures of visual experience.
Recent projects include the solo exhibition of painting and sculpture, A tax on a bag and other landscapes (University of Illinois Springfield), put a bow on it. a curatorial investigation into the visual language of “girl stuff” (Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago) and Visual Languages of Camouflage and Painting an on-going archive of historical painting and studio art lessons that explore the tradition and impact of visual trickery developed while teaching an arts+science course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (University of Chicago, Woods Hole MA).
Lee is a Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University, a member of the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago, and the Deputy Director of the Lit & Luz Festival, a program that facilitates cultural exchange between artists and writers in Chicago and Mexico.