portraits by Olivia Perillo
Lynda Frese is professor emeritus at the University of Louisiana, in Lafayette, where she served on the visual arts faculty for thirty years. She received BFA (1978) and MFA (1986) degrees from the University of California at Davis, and was a fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She received the Louisiana 2016 Artist of the Year Award for her sustained work celebrating the history and culture of the south.
The artist was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, and the Bogliasco Center in Liguria, Italy. She was an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome twice. Her book Pachamama: earth realm was produced during three residencies in Costa Rica. She has been artist-in-residence for many years at studios in the Apennine mountains of Assisi, Italy and in the Italian Alps of Valcamonica; in the USA, she has had residencies at Shadows-on-the-Teche in south Louisiana, at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia, and at Vashon Artist Residency on Vashon Island, Washington.
Frese’s work as photographer, painter, and printmaker has been exhibited across the United States, and in Europe and South America. Her work is in many private art collections and public institutions, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY, the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, CA, the Mississippi Museum, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
The 2018 exhibition Lynda Frese: Holy Memories & Earthly Delights, at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, LA., surveyed 40 years of the artist’s work from early toned gelatin silver prints produced in California, to recent photo-collage and egg tempera works. An eponymous monograph with critical essays was published by UL Press. Her art practice was featured as part of the documentary film Intention (2020) which premiered at the New Orleans French Film Festival.