Nancy Frankel

Nancy Frankel was born and raised in Washington, DC. She studied art at the Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University. Frankel earned her master's of fine arts degree at Columbia University. While living in New York, Frankel took a painting course with Hans Hofmann, where she was exposed to abstract impressionism.[2]

Nancy Frankel began sculpting while at Temple University. After earning her MFA, Frankel learned how to weld at the SculptureCenter. Although she practiced regularly in the years following World War II, Frankel describes herself and her work as "invisible" until her interaction with other women artists at the 1972 Conference for Women in the Visual Arts, which was held at the Corcoran in DC.[3][4] This conference allowed women artists, including Frankel, to navigate professional vetting structures - known as slide registries - by which an artist's work became known to area galleries. In 2019, the Katzen Arts Center at American University mounted a retrospective exhibition of Nancy Frankel's work - "Nancy at Ninety: A Retrospective of Form and Color."[5]