Cianne Fragione (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist whose roots in the San Francisco Bay Area Beat and Funk art milieus have informed a process-oriented artistic vocabulary developed over four decades, crossing boundaries between abstract painting and sculpture, and object and image. Her signature style combines oil paint, mixed-media materials, found objects, and textiles. Each work is built slowly over extended periods, synthesizing personal perspectives and influences, including mid-century gestural abstraction and the physical fluency of her early training as a professional dancer. While her two-dimensional works emphasize space and movement, her assemblages are denser and more corporeal. Her most recent work intersects visual art and poetry, drawing on Ossi di Seppia, a collection of poems by Italian poet and writer Eugenio Montale.

Fragione has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at the Phillips Collection, DC; Wall of She, Antwerp, Belgium; St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, Moraga, CA; Georgetown College, KY; Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York, NY; American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY, New York, NY; Associazione di Museo D’Arte Contemporaneo Italiano, Catanzaro, Italy; Harmony Hall Regional Center, Washington, MD; University of Scranton Art Museum, Scranton, PA; The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.; Art in Embassies, Geneva, Sofia, Bulgaria, and Vilnius, Lithuania; Indianapolis Art Center, IN; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gallery, CA. Her work is held in public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; DC Commission Art Bank Collection; Art in Embassies Permanent Collection, U.S. State Department, Guadalajara, Mexico; St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, CA; Italian American Museum, D.C.; Department of Special Collections, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, CA; and Comune di Monasterace, Calabria, Italy, as well as other museum and private collections.

Fragione has received numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, including Art Omi; the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Fellowship; The Legacy Project (Saving the Legacy), supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation; Studio dei Nipoti artist residency, Monasterace, Italy; Soaring Gardens, Laceyville, PA; Spoleto Study Abroad in Spoleto, Italy; and an Artist-in-Institution grant from the California Arts Council, Sacramento, CA. She was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Award and twice for the Anonymous Was a Woman Award for artistic achievement. She received her MFA in Painting/Mixed Media in 1987 from John F. Kennedy University Fiberworks Center for the Arts, Berkeley, CA. During this time, she was a guest graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a fellowship that enabled her to work with artists associated with the Beat and Funk movements in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, in 1981. Fragione’s studio is in Washington, D.C., and she is represented by Nunu Fine Art in New York, NY, and Taipei, Taiwan.