About the Artist
Antonio Frasconi
Born in Buenos Aires of Italian descent, Frasconi was actually raised in Uruguay. Largely self-taught, he dropped out of art school at age 12 and became a printer’s apprentice. In 1945 he emigrated to New York on a one-year scholarship to the Art Students League.
The following year he headed out West and worked as a gardener and security guard at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Within months of his employment he had his first show at the museum, then an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art the next year. In 1953, Time magazine declared him to be “America’s foremost practitioner of the ancient art of the woodcut.” Politically active, he created a series of woodcut portraits of people who were tortured and killed under the military dictatorship in Uruguay, and later created works on the subject of Vietnam and the Ohio National Guard’s killing of four students at Kent State University in 1970.
In addition to his personal art, he designed scores of commercial work, including books, magazine and album covers, holiday cards, posters, calendars, and a U.S. postage stamp that honored the centennial of the National Academy of Sciences. The scope of his oeuvre includes children’s books he not only illustrated but authored, among them The House That Jack Built and See and Say: Guarda e parla; Mira y habla; Regarde et parle, which taught kids how to speak in four languages. Frasconi died on January 8, 2013 at the age of 93, leaving behind over 100 book illustrations and work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute.
