• BIOGRAPHIES

Frank Koester was born in 1946. I am a native of New York and grew up in Bayside Queens. Happily, my artistic inclinations were met with parental encouragement, my mother having studied at the Traphagen School and later under a Master portrait painter Dimitri Romanovsky.

See her art on line at,

http://web.mac.com/fkpm/Family_of_Thought/Artist_Anna_Koester.html

But my creative exploration lead to more practical arts. After High School,

impatient to begin, I “dove” into my career by taking a two-fold path. I worked as an Junior Draftsmen in an Architectural Firm and enrolled at Pratt Institute in the Industrial Design Department.

Early in my career I felt a need to use my “practical” art in a way that conveyed ideas not just utility. I found myself drawn to exhibitry and the design of public spaces. The projects I worked on set demands that made me develop skills not only as designer but Artist, Sculptor, Photographer, Graphic Designer, Architect, even Project and Construction Manager. Between 1973 and 1976, I spearheaded a major exhibit for the Smithsonian Institute’s celebration of the Bicentennial called

“A Nation of Nations”. It was during this project that I first approached collage and assemblage as a vehicle for expression. The project culminated in an 80,000 artifact assemblage and the discovery of an exciting medium for me to explore. I realize, that the “day-to-day” tools and mediums that we take for granted are often first developed through an artistic need. My most demanding innovations or “stretches” are made not for the building but to tell the story. These techniques are only later used for more practical purposes. Point in fact, my current assemblages rely on state-of-the-art adhesives that a few years ago were unavailable and that even today are yet to be used to their potential for practical applications. I completed my first series of collages in October of 1991 and have since produced a considerable body of work.