Gabriela Denise Frank: Writer

Gabriela Denise Frank is a writer, editor, and educator living in the Pacific Northwest.

As an artist and educator, I believe in the power of literary art as a tool for transformation. Words written, spoken, and sung help us understand the radical vulnerability of being connected to everything—including each other.

Literary Art Installations

Downstream/Upstream

The visual-text-sonic literary art installation unfolds across four banners displayed on a city-owned fence at Frances Anderson Center Playfield in Edmonds, WA, from September 2024 to February 2025. Readings of the poems were recorded and mixed at Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of Jack Straw’s Artist Support program.

STOREFRONT STORY

**As part of Shunpike's Storefronts program, I installed a multi-media short story made of visual art, text, and audio recording in a South Lake Union storefront window.**
*Image credit: Jo Cosme.*

“The Martian’s Job, After All, is to Interpret the World” considers relationships we hold dear: with nature, each other, and the planet we share with all creatures.
Following its 2022 Seattle premiere, STOREFRONT STORY moved to Burien in 2023 and Seattle’s Uptown neighborhood in 2024. Listen to the story here.

UTILITY BOX ART WRAPS

**The City of Bellingham’s utility box artwork program seeks to reinforce a sense of place and enhance the identity of urban districts while adding beauty and interest to the streetscape.** Two of my designs, which began as mixed-media collages, were selected for display. *In Search of Nectar* is located at State & Maple.

*How Do I Look, Darling?* is located
at State & Chestnut.

UTILITY CABINET ART WRAPS

**This public art program supports the vitality and attractiveness of SeaTac, Washington, by wrapping utility boxes in art to deter blight, graffiti, and vandalism.**
*The Oracular Glows Inside the Ordinary*, draws upon surreal imagery to create a playful dreamlike world of fanciful juxtapositions: a flower with lips smoking a cigarette, a donkey reading a book, floating bridges, a ball bouncing through time.

*Midlife Conditional As Crustacean Morphology* pairs a crab-shaped concrete poem with an original ink rendering. The text explores aging through the metaphor of molting, a phenomenon that echoes the way humans morph and change with age. Listen to a recording produced at Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of their Artist Support program.

UGLY ME
at Jack Straw Cultural Center

UGLY ME is an exploration of beauty, worth and the power of the selfie.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where does self-worth reside?

UGLY ME was a visual-texual-sonic installation that explored the interplay between appearance and self-worth through collage, fashion photography, distorted selfies and spoken prose. Readings of twelve original works played as a backdrop to a series of comical personal images and large-scale typographic collage. Visitors were encouraged to listen, linger and contribute their own selfies to the investigation.

Learn more about the project and listen to an interview via Jack Straw Cultural Center.

This project was supported in part by awards from 4Culture and Jack Straw.

A Novel Performance
at Seattle Public Library

A Novel Performance was a month-long installation centered around National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which takes place each November. Over 30 days, writers attempt to compose a minimum of 50,000 words—essentially, the first draft of a novel.

My project took this challenge a step further. by unveiling the writing process within a public forum. Merging literary art and performance installation, A Novel Performance explored several questions: how do writers approach the creation of book-length works? What artistic and practical challenges do writers wrestle with as their work develops? What happens to the creative process under an acutely compressed schedule? What is the role of failure in literary art, and how do writers incorporate and acknowledge its presence in their work without giving up?

As a novelist in residence at Seattle Central Library, I wrote the first draft of a novel and had the pleasure of daily interactions with library visitors and staff. At the conclusion of the month, I had written 70,355 words, thus “winning” the NaNoWriMo Challenge, one positive outcome amongst many during my installation.

Read Paul Constant's article about the installation in The Stranger or listen to Rachel Belle's podcast on KIRO FM. You can also read my essay in The Rumpus about living in the library for a month.

This project was supported in part by an award from 4Culture.

Mushroom Farm
at [storefront] Olson Kundig

Installed at [storefront] Olson Kundig, Mushroom Farm invited visitors to consider the far-reaching impacts of a simple lifestyle choice—purchasing a cup of coffee—as a nexus for sustainable awareness, community-building and a model for future urban agricultural practice. While most coffee grounds enter a traditional waste stream after a barista pulls a shot, Mushroom Farm re-purposed them into a growing medium for oyster mushrooms.

The space contained a twelve-foot by sixteen-foot mushroom growing tent and a twenty-foot-long table made from reclaimed timbers for gatherings, lectures and lunches. The ribs of the growing tent were made of reclaimed plywood form boards that would have ended up in a landfill. The project was made possible through three grants from Invoking the Pause and collaborations with CityLab7, Olson Kundig, and Dowbuilt.

Photo credits (images below): Mushroom Farm (top left) photo by Kevin Scott; oyster mushroom (top middle) by Joe Iano; Seattle Public Library photos (top right, second row middle) by Nick Spang; Bushwick Book Club (second row right) by Melissa Thompson.