J. (SAN FRANCISCO) -- These days, she teaches art through the Older Adults program at City College of San Francisco, including an art class for adults with memory loss, in which she uses the Art Kit. She also teaches collage and printmaking to older adults at San Francisco State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
“I have spent most of my life giving to others, especially older adults,” she said. “All that giving has to have a portion of giving to oneself, or you get burned out. That’s where my artwork has come in.”
Fraknoi’s one-woman retrospective, currently at the Peninsula Museum of Art, displays her penchant for thoughtful exploration of the important themes in her life: as a woman, an immigrant, and the daughter of European survivors. Artistically, she expresses these preoccupations somewhat symbolically, in images such as “secret containers, lost keys, unfinished stories, old-world recipes, and fading memories … how much to hide and how much to reveal becomes a constant theme of my work,” her artist statement explains.