Hannah Frank art news June 2010
Fiona Frank
Poetry Competition entrants:
POETRY COMPETITION ANNOUNCING WINNERS VERY SOON
We come to you this with exciting news about the Hannah Frank poetry
competition which closed for entries on 31 March. Glasgow Mirrorball
poet, William Bonar, has collated the poems and his fellow Mirrorball
poet, David Kinloch, is currently completing the judging.
In total we had 518 entries, across every age category, and from all
over Scotland and further afield. The Poetry Society, whose president
is Jo Shapcott, and which lists Carol Ann Duffy, Benjamin Zephaniah,
and Simon Armitage among its board members, praised our efforts.
“A total of over 500 entries for a first competition such as this is a
really good result,” said the Society’s Alan Ward.
We will contact the competition winners by the end of June. The
presentation to all winners will take place on 23 August 2010, the
date that would have been my late aunt’s 102nd birthday. The poetry
competition has been funded by the sale of three of my aunt’s original
drawings to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (see below) – and the
presentation will take place at Kelvingrove itself, where prize
winners, and their teachers, friends and family will be able to see
the original drawings in their new home.
Would you like to join us at the presentation, where you’ll be able to
hear the winning poems, and meet the winning poets? It will take
place at 11 a.m. on Monday 23rd August at Kelvingrove Gallery,
Glasgow. Put the date in your diary – if you’re NOT a winner, or if
you’re just a poetry fan rather than a poet, you’ll still be most
welcome. Please RSVP if you’d like to come. (By the way each winner
will have a chance to arrive an hour earlier and, along with a friend,
take part in some special ‘up close and personal’ activities with
items in the Museum collection prior to the presentation.)
Our sincere thanks to William Bonar, David Kinloch, all the teachers
who have worked on Hannah Frank poetry with their pupils, and of
course, to all who entered. There are still ten FREE Hannah Frank
packs (two books and a DVD) available for Scottish schools and youth
groups – please get in touch. And calling all the school groups who
have already had a free pack: we know that you’ve all found amazingly
creative ways of working with groups of people to get them to come up
with original poetry. Would you consider spending a little time
writing down your methods so we can share them with others? Thanks so
much. (You can see the ideas that ‘Mrs Wood’ from Pollokshields had,
on my blog http://fionaathannahfrank.blogspot.com/ )
POETRY BOOK
We are planning to put together a book of the poems. A selection of
the best poems will be chosen for this book and each set of poems will
be grouped around the drawing that inspired them. We will be working
on this after the presentations are over and are hoping it will be
ready for Christmas and Chanukah presents. It’s likely to retail at
around £10.00 – watch this space!
GLASGOW MUSEUMS ACQUIRES HANNAH FRANK WORKS
Three original Hannah Frank works are to join the collection of
Glasgow Museums. Two of Hannah’s black and white drawings - ‘I sought
him but I found him not’, from 1935, and ‘Wrap thy form in a mantle
grey’, from 1941 – will join the collection along with a set of six
mounted woodcuts.
One of the woodcuts is a bookplate my aunt made for my father, Leo
Frank. He was a medical student and it includes the tools of his
trade - a skull, as well as some medical textbooks. There is also a
bookplate that Hannah made for her own books – it’s an image
representing the artist herself, with the tools of her trade: a brush
and a pen, as well as her trademark star, and two-branched tree –
personal symbols that run through many of her eerie, black and white
drawings.
We are very pleased that my late aunt’s home city art gallery has
chosen to honour her in this way. The city's Culture and Sport
officers have been very supportive during the acquisition process, and
the official handover took place on 27 April.
We are very keen for more of my aunt’s original works to join public
collections. Can you help? Please get in touch.
GLASGOW JEWISH REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL YEARBOOK 2010
An article on Hannah Frank will form part of a ‘trilogy’ featuring
three Glasgow women artists the city has known and lost in recent
times. The other two are Marianne Grant and Hilda Goldwag. The
articles will feature in the centre pages of the yearbook, accompanied
by examples of each artist’s work.
HANNAH FRANK ARCHIVES – CATALOGUING COMPLETED
The student archivists from Glasgow University who have been
cataloguing the extensive Hannah Frank archive of letters, diaries,
certificates and other paperwork my aunt kept and which now resides at
the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) have completed the first
part of their task! In early July a visiting Australian doctoral
student, who is investigating the life of another Jewish woman
sculptor who studied under Benno Schotz, will become the first
researcher to make use of this archive. The Archive is open on Friday
mornings by appointment and on monthly Sunday afternoon open days –
see www.sjac.org.uk for further details. The Jewish Chronicle
mentioned the ‘important acquisition’ of the Hannah Frank and Lionel
Levy papers in their report of the SJAC’s Annual General Meeting.
GOING, GOING, GONE!
A full set of 16 Hannah Frank signed prints and a bronze sculpture
(Seated Figure 1972 - http://tiny.cc/i4020 ) will be on sale at
McTears Scottish Contemporary Art Auction, on Wednesday 14 July at
06:00 PM. Viewing is Saturday 10th July 10am till 1pm, Monday 12th
July 11am till 7pm, Tuesday 13th July 9am till 5pm, and Wednesday 14th
all day from 9am. Money raised from this sale will go towards
keeping my aunt’s name in the public domain. McTears auction previews
and their web presence are very visible and we hope this auction and
preview exhibition will bring my aunt’s art to a large new audience.
If you can’t get to McTears in Meiklewood Road, Glasgow G51 4EU, you
can bid on the auction live on-line if you like at
http://tiny.cc/i4020 - or just watch the excitement. You have to
register first, it’s a very simple process.
There will also be a Hannah Frank sculpture in the August Scottish
Sale at Bonhams in Edinburgh. This is ‘Double Figure, 1993’
http://tinyurl.com/3ajs6cm . The bronze can currently be seen in the
window of Bonhams’ Queen Street premises. It is likely to be included
in the ‘Pictures’ section on Tuesday 17 Aug 2010 at 2 p.m. What’s
great about this is that it will be on show from now onwards and right
through the festival, bringing my aunt’s work to the attention of
thousands of visitors to Edinburgh. Bonhams accepts telephone bids
and absentee bids – see their website at http://tinyurl.com/2vgs2sp
for more info.
Again, money raised will go towards keeping my aunt’s name in the
public domain. The poetry competition was funded by the sale of the
original works to Glasgow City Museums. The next project I have in
mind (after the book publication) is to set up a fund to support
future researchers to use the Hannah Frank and Lionel Levy archives at
the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre. And – watch this space – I have
been approached by a Glasgow gallery which is interested in exhibiting
my aunt’s drawings and sculpture! And there will be an exhibition of
prints at The Gregson, Moor Lane, Lancaster, in December 2010 – with
an early evening showing of the film Hannah Frank, The Spark Divine,
followed by a Klezmer Dance Night with live music from The Klatch and
Yiddish Story Telling from the deputy Storyteller Laureate,
Shonaleigh, as part of the programme on Saturday 11th December.
Any questions, comments, to ask to be taken off this list, enquiries
about prices for sculptures and signed prints, please get in touch.
Please pass the website details on to ten friends! And if you’re on
Facebook, please invite your Facebook friends to join the ‘I love
Hannah Frank Art’ group.
Best wishes
Fiona Frank
Niece of the late Hannah Frank
fiona...@gmail.com
www.hannahfrank.org.uk