Born in London, England, in 1933 Mary Frank moved to the United States with her family in 1940. In the early 1950s she studied with Hans Hofmann and Max Beckmann. Frank works across disciplines as a sculptor, painter, photographer and gifted ceramic artist.  Without allegiance to any particular way of working or medium, Frank is fueled by her ever present urge for direct and honest expression.  Frank's process begins with some form of abstraction from which she teases out what she describes as a pre-existing time and atmosphere where events can take place. Her recurring imagery act as an alphabet, combined in order to evoke feelings of grief, love, sorrow, ecstasy, mourning and exultation.

The artist has been the subject of numerous solo museum and gallery exhibitions, including the 2022 retrospective exhibition, Mary Frank: The Observing Heart, at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, accompanied by a catalogue with essay by curator David Hornung, and Mary Frank: Finding My Way Home, which originated at the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC, in 2014 and traveled to the Butler Institute in Youngstown, OH, in 2015. Work by Mary Frank was included in the Whitney Museum’s 2020 exhibition, Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950 – 2019, and the Brooklyn Museum’s 2020 exhibition, Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection.

Eakins Press Foundation has published two collaborations between Mary Frank and the environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams, the 2022 catalogue What My Body Knows and the 2020 catalogue A Burning Testament. Illustrations by Mary Frank were projected during Falling Out of Time, a song cycle composed by Osvaldo Golijov, which premiered in New York in 2022. In 2017, a solo exhibition at DC Moore Gallery coincided with the publication of the monograph, Pilgrimage: Photographs by Mary Frank, by the Eakins Press Foundation with texts by the poet and critic John Yau and Terry Tempest Williams. In 2014, the documentary film, Visions of Mary Frank, was produced and released by filmmaker John Cohen.

Mary Frank’s work is in many public collections, including, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; The Fogg Art Museum, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Jewish Museum, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Morgan Library and Museum, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Storm King Art Center, NY; The Whitney Museum, NY; and The Yale University Art Gallery, CT.

Mary Frank lives and works in New York City and Bearsville, NY.