Years ago, the artist Harry Gould Harvey IV came across a fallen black walnut tree in a friend’s yard. He experienced a moment of revelation and felt a sudden urge to make a frame for his drawings from the dying tree.
“It defined my practice pretty starkly,” recalled Harvey, who is known for his gothic-inspired frames akin to polyptychs. After years of working as a professional photographer, Harvey, who is now represented by P.P.O.W., had turned to drawing as a more intimate form of expression. But he’d felt something was missing. In building frames from the world around him, he tapped into an atavistic connection to Fall River, Massachusetts, where he was born and raised.
“Working with found wood that has specific provenance to location and a certain history and carving it into frames became a way to contextualize the drawings with the value of place,” he said. Harvey is one of many contemporary artists who are choosing or creating borders for their works that push against the understated, unobtrusive frames that have dominated exhibition spaces for over a century. These artists are reclaiming the frame not only as a boundary, but as an extension of the artwork itself—a vessel for narrative, memory, and material resonance, drawing from the depths of art history in new ways.
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