Fran Forman

Areas of Expertise

Visual Art; Graphic Design

Email: fforman@brandeis.edu

Current Project

While incorporating historical imagery with commonplace objects and settings, I create images that explore the issues of time and the ambiguity and complexity of emotion. The images house hidden narratives that center on the relationship of women to the natural world, family,  the passage of time, and the historic continuum.

Biography

Fran studied art and sociology as an undergraduate at Brandeis University and then received an MSW, working for several years with heroin addicts. Discovering that she could indeed earn a living in the arts, her life-long passion, she entered Boston University’s School of Fine Arts where, specializing in photography and graphic design, she received her MFA in 1977.  

She has held a succession of positions in the field of design: branding, print, and signage for corporate, arts, and retail establishments; CD-roms for books, museum installations, sales and training; cover illustrations for several books; animations, multimedia, and web designs. Until 2005, Fran was Senior Designer with AOL Time Warner, where she was the designer of Africana.com, the preeminent web site devoted to African American culture.

Between professional life and raising two daughters, Fran continued to create her personal art, combining her illustrative and photographic skills with a passion for surrealism, paradox, illusion, assemblage, and the dislocations of time and place. She has exhibited widely, and her work was recently the cover and feature story in a monthly arts magazine.

Education

M.F.A, Boston University

M.S.W, Simmons College

B.A., Brandeis University

Representative Publications

Forman, Fran.  A Jack Kerouac Romnibus, Penguin 1996.  Electronic book in a CD-rom format based on the life, times and literature of the Beat author, Jack Kerouac.

Forman, Fran.  Becoming Americans, Strawbery  Banke Museum, 1998.  A CD–rom and multi-media exhibit  based on the life of an early 20th-century Jewish immigrant girl and her family, for Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, a living museum.

Links

Curriculum Vitae

Personal Web Page