Tupelo artist, Ke Francis presents “The Implied Narrative,” a series of etchings, engravings, hand-made books and paintings at Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts August 27 – September 24. Francis will give a gallery talk and narrative reading Tuesday night, August 28 at 6PM. Francis’s colorful compositions bring familiar Southern symbols to life. Motivated by a graphic style and love of story, his bold creations of place and character vibrate with motion and plot.
Ke Francis is a narrative artist who has been actively producing artwork for more than fifty years. His books, paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures are in over thirty major public and private collections including the Getty Museum, the National Gallery, the National Museum of American Art, the High Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Fine Art, the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, the Van-Pelt Dietrich Collection, the Polaroid Collection, and the Ginsburg Collection in Johannesburg. He has exhibited with, collaborated with, and curated exhibits with some of the most influential artists of this century, including Sam Francis, William T. Wiley, Bill Christenberry, Terry Allen, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Wendell Castle, Albert Paley, and Robert Stackhouse. His creative works in bookarts, painting, printmaking and sculpture have won grants and awards from the Rockefeller Bellagio Study Center, The Southern Arts Federation, The Susan B. Herron Award (Mississippi Arts Commission), the Beck Foundation, the Polaroid Foundation and the Deep South Humanities Council.
Francis resides in Tupelo, Mississippi, where he and his wife Mary are the co-owners of HOOPSNAKE PRESS, a fine art press that publishes artist books and prints.
