An Artist’s Childhood Re-Enacted

by Renny Pritikin

Jona Frank’s trenchant photography describes the pitfalls of childhood and young adulthood in middle-class America.  Her first book, High School, from 2004, documented a common strategy teenagers use to survive adolescence: joining a group.  The range of such behaviors included adopting the identities of oddball television characters or break dancing.  Four years later, she explored Patrick Henry College for home-schooled evangelical Christians.  Its mission is to groom future right-wing leaders.  Her latest effort, You Are Not Enough, examines the personal damage family dynamics impose on a particular kid: herself.  The undertaking includes a memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined, a lavishly designed artist book, and a catalog from a prior Bowdoin College Museum of Art exhibition. 

Frank’s ambition is to meld autobiography with self-portraiture to create a hybrid visual and literary exegesis of family dynamics within an archetypal late 20^th-century suburban home where perfection was the overriding goal.  The title, You Are Not Enough, encapsulates that view and its cost: no matter how much she strove, she could never approach the flawlessness her mother demanded.  For example, Frank portrays her mother, a devout Catholic, refusing to speak to her children for days if they dared to violate one of her many rules.  Frank was expected to be obedient and pious and only harbor ambitions toward marriage.  As a nascent artist, she was miserable most of the time, surviving through fantasy.  One telling anecdote involves her mother’s wrath when a teacher called to complain that Frank failed to complete her art assignments.  The artist confesses to the reader that she was so overwhelmed by the perfection of the white paper and the number of possible images she could place on it that she never got around to drawing anything. 

This exhibition consists of a suite of color photographs utilizing actors playing the artist and her mother, portrayed by the actress Laura Dern.  These are elaborate theatrical photo set-ups using extensive costumes, sets and props.  Formally close to other artists like Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, they operate on a much more personal, intimate, and less-grand scale, closer to Laurie Simmons’s dollhouse dramas.  Most of the story takes place in a painfully restrained home, but one event Frank re-creates took place at a local supermarket.  At around age 10, she accidentally knocked over a huge display of breakfast

cereal.  Frank shot the image from a low angle, the vantage point of the fallen boxes, with a horrified little girl standing over them.  Since the event occurred in the 20^th century, Frank had to re-create the look of Lucky Charms boxes and that of period signage, price tags and surrounding displays.  It’s convincing — and a highlight of the project.

At least three girls play Frank at different ages, almost always seen in tandem with Dern, often in matching outfits.  All wear wigs simulating the short hair Frank was required to wear by her image-conscious mother, who, in middle age, sported the same look, emphasizing her desire for Jona to follow suit.  One of the most affecting pieces is a diptych in which a tween-aged Jona lays on a sofa with her head upside down, hanging off the edge.  Beneath it is an upside-down image from the child’s point of view of her mom framed in an open doorway: a moving embodiment of an estranged, inchoate child.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a dollhouse-sized replica of her childhood home in New Jersey.  Peer through the upstairs window, and you’ll see a slide show of family photographs.  The original family wall phone appears, as do four faux cakes with icing, each carrying a word that spells the exhibition title:  You.  Are.  Not.  Enough.   A set of comic embroidered patches that refer to themes in the memoir show up in a

framed grid.  These include her beloved overalls, despised by her mother for not being feminine, and the Kodak logo, a longstanding signifier of sentimentality.   Frank also used toile-style wallpapers as backdrops in many of the photographs.  They anachronistically depict various drawings, including of one of Frank’s High School prints, her suburban home, and a sketch of the famous photograph of Dorothea Lange on the roof of a 1930s station wagon. 

These pictures pose as period snapshots, but with all the randomness and clumsiness removed, they soon change into something else: carefully calibrated fabrications of memories.  Like all memoirs, Frank’s is a work of art from her perspective.  A parallel exhibition from other family members’ points of view might move the saga in different directions.  Frank admits that while she had a comfortable, safe childhood, she and her siblings suffered from their parents’ unhappiness and her mother’s troubled mental health.  That’s hardly a new story, but the underlying tale reveals how at least one boomer overcame psychological and societal obstacles to become an artist.  As such, the exhibition adds to the accumulating body of research into the lives of those who have made that journey.

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Jona Frank: “You Are Not Enough” @ Euqinom Gallery through June 24, 2023. 

About the author: Renny Pritikin was the chief curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 to 2018.  Before that, he was the director of the Richard Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and the founding chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning in 1992.  For 11 years, he was also a senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, where he taught in the graduate program in Curatorial Practice.  Pritikin has given lecture tours in museums in Japan as a guest of the State Department, in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, and visited Israel as a Koret Israel Prize winner.  The Prelinger Library published his most recent book of poems, Westerns and Dramas, in 2020.  He is the United States correspondent for Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal. His memoir, At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists, will be published this fall.