"We don’t need more walls. We need more bridges. I paint to build them." — Chawky
Born in Zahlé, Lebanon, in 1960, Chawky Frenn is a Lebanese-American painter whose practice confronts questions of human rights, social justice, and the moral complexities of contemporary life. Based in the United States since 1981, he has developed a body of work that intertwines meticulous figuration with symbolic and political imagery.
Frenn studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, earning a BFA in Painting in 1985, followed by an MFA in Painting from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia and Rome, in 1988. He later joined the faculty at George Mason University, where he is now Professor of Art and the recipient of the institution’s Teaching Excellence Award (2009). He received two Fulbright-Nehru awards to conduct research and teaching in India, first in 2017, and again with his current 2024-25 fellowship at Banaras Hindu University.
His practice ranges from large-scale oil paintings to mixed-media works on paper, often integrating quotations and text with visual narratives. Through these constructed surfaces, he explores themes of war, displacement, power, and the endurance of the human spirit, situating personal memory within broader political and historical frameworks.
Frenn has presented solo exhibitions such as Ecce Homo at the Housatonic Museum of Art (Bridgeport, 2001) and We the People, for Show or for Sure at The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, 2020). His work has also been included in group exhibitions such as Inside Outside, Upside Down at The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C., 2021) and Homeward Bound! at the Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, 2021-22). Frenn is the author of 100 Boston Painters (2012) and 100 Boston Artists (2013), both published by Schiffer, and the monograph Art for Life’s Sake (published 2005 in Beirut by Fine Arts Consulting and Publishing).
His works are held in the public collections of the Springfield Museum of Art (Ohio), the Housatonic Museum of Art (Connecticut), the Museum of Recent Art (Bucharest), and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut). In 2025, the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) also acquired a work from his We the People series.
