Frank Fleming

Frank Fleming was born on a farm in Alabama in 1940. He suffered from a severe speech impediment, which caused him to stop talking in school in the first grade, and he did not speak in public for the next eleven years. More comfortable in the outdoors, and because words often failed him, he came to express himself in images. Fleming found his niche at Florence State College, where he learned how to work with clay from a maid who cleaned the classrooms. The fantastic and playful quality in Fleming’s work is a product of his childhood and his involvement in the 1970s funk art movement in California.