Carol Hoorn Fraser

Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930–1991) was an American-born figurative artist who worked for thirty years in Nova Scotia, Canada, with a commitment to life values, a distrust of what George Orwell called smelly little orthodoxies, and a belief in craftsmanship as the best enabler of creative individuation.

Biographical Details

Carol Hoorn Fraser at the easel, 1970s.

Carol Hoorn Fraser was born on September 5, 1930, in Depression-era Superior, Wisconsin. Her father, Arvid Hoorn, was a Swedish-American Lutheran pastor who built the family home and three churches with his own hands. Her mother, Hazel, from an English tradition, did exquisite needlework, had an M.A. in Home Economics, and supported the family after Rev. Hoorn died of cancer in 1945.

Carol attended Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, graduating in 1951 with a major in chemistry and biology and a minor in art and literature. After a year as a research chemist at Archer Daniels Midland in St. Paul, she audited theology lectures at the University of Göttingen, Germany (1952–53), and then worked for a year as a nurse's aide in the cancer recovery ward at the University Hospital in Minneapolis. During this time she took extension classes and earned enough credits to be accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Minnesota, from which she graduated in 1959 with a minor in Philosophy and a 125-page thesis on "The Human Image in Contemporary Painting". She was Lorenz Eitner’s course assistant and took classes from Malcolm Myers, John Hospers, and Allen Tate, among others. Van Gogh and Käthe Kollwitz were particular heroes of hers. She exhibited widely in the Twin Cities.

She married Ph.D. student John Fraser in 1956 and, in 1961, when he accepted a job in the Dalhousie University English Department, moved with him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was to spend the rest of her life, with time in Provence and Mexico. In 1977 she developed asthma and hyper-allergic sensitivities because of urea formaldehyde foam insulation. Her career as an artist spanned more than thirty years. During this time she produced a large body of figurative work using a variety of media. In the later 1960s she moved away from a modified Expressionism to a hard-edged organicism with ongoing ecological themes. In the 1980s she did a series of over a hundred strong-hued symbolical watercolours. She was an avid gardener.

From 1964 to 1969 she taught drawing part-time at the School of Architecture at the Technical University of Nova Scotia. During the Seventies she curated a show of Expressionist prints and was Acting Director of the Dalhousie University Art Gallery for a year, curating the Fourth Dalhousie Drawing Exhibition in 1979. She also did free-lance public lecturing and in the Eighties did some art-reviewing for ArtsAtlantic. She believed in clarity in art-discourse, and practiced it herself. She died at her home in Halifax on April 3, 1991, of cancer of the lungs. A Frida Kahlo calendar was on the wall beside her bed.

Selected Publications: by the artist

Selected Awards and Honours

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Squash Blossoms
Dalhousie University Art Gallery; Beaverbrook Art Gallery; Confederation Centre Art Gallery; Memorial Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; Southern Alberta University Art Gallery; Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery; Musée de Quebec.
Beaverbrook Art Gallery; Saint Mary's University Art Gallery; Confederation Centre Art Gallery; Memorial University Art Gallery; London Regional Art Gallery; Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery.
Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, Beaverbrook Art Gallery

Selected Group Exhibitions

Selected Public Collections

Acadia University Art Gallery; Air Canada; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Beaverbrook Art Gallery; Canada Council Art Bank; Concordia University; Confederation Centre Art Gallery; Dalhousie University Art Gallery; Department of External Affairs, Ottawa; Howe International, Toronto; Mount Allison University Art Gallery; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; National Gallery of Canada; Norcen Energy Corporation, Toronto; Province of Nova Scotia Art Bank; Teleglobe Canada, Inc., Montreal; Walker Art Center

Selected References

External links

  1. ↑ "Members since 1880". Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
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