Tom S. Fricano: The Afterlife of Process

Tom S. Fricano, Portrait by Frans Hals. Intaglio print (etching or drypoint) on paper, signed in pencil at lower right and inscribed with its title at lower left, in a carved gilt frame. Acanthus archive.

Tom S. Fricano (1930–2020) was an American printmaker, painter, and educator whose career spanned nearly five decades. Much of it was spent teaching at what is now California State University, Northridge, where he led the printmaking department. He is remembered less for one famous image than for a way of working: method treated as inheritance, and repetition practiced as discipline rather than routine.

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The Teacher at the Press

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Fricano was born and raised in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned his B.F.A. from Bradley University in 1953 and his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois in 1956, where he worked under the printmaker Lee Chesney. He served in the Army in France from 1956 to 1957, running a craft shop in special services. In 1960 a Fulbright grant took him to Florence and the Accademia di Belle Arti; a Louis Comfort Tiffany research grant followed in 1965, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1969. He joined the faculty of San Fernando Valley State College, later Cal State Northridge, in 1963, and stayed for the rest of his teaching life.

His prints entered public collections along the way. The Library of Congress acquired five of his prints through the Pennell Fund, and period exhibition notices record his work at the Philadelphia Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and a number of university collections.

‍Among his students was my grandmother, who studied with him for years. The prints preserved in our family came directly from Fricano himself, gifts to a student he taught, several inscribed to my grandparents in his own hand. She spoke less about technique than about pauses: how he would wait before printing, letting the room settle, as if stillness were part of the work. "Good art has to deal with all the principles of art: design, color, textures, content of the work, message, draftsmanship and dimension," he told a reporter in 1993. "Emotion is important in a work." He was describing prints, but he taught it as a way of paying attention.

The object at the center of this journal is Portrait by Frans Hals, an intaglio print after the Dutch painter, its figures drawn in fine etched or drypoint line and dense, scratched shadow. It is signed in pencil at the lower right and inscribed with its title at the lower left, with a proof notation between them. It sits in a carved gilt frame. The print remains undated.

Intaglio was only one of his hands. In relief he cut and printed color woodcuts and cardboard cuts; later he built collagraph and mixed-media plates, and a process he called the assemblegraph. The five works held by the Library of Congress all come from the relief side of that range: four color woodcuts and a cardboard cut, made between 1954 and 1961 and acquired for the collection through the Pennell Fund, the Library's endowment for print purchases. Among them, Spirit of Motion received the Purchase Prize at the Library's National Exhibition of Prints in 1955. All five are catalogued in Karen F. Beall's American Prints in the Library of Congress (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970).

Different as the processes are, they share a logic. A woodcut prints from the raised surface left after everything else is cut away; an intaglio print pulls its ink from lines bitten or scratched below the surface. Either way, the image is delivered by pressure: paper driven against block or plate until the mark transfers, and the sheet keeps a faint physical record of that contact. A print, for him, was less a picture than a record of the pressure that made it.

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What the Press Keeps

A print holds evidence the way furniture does. The sheet keeps the pressure of the block or plate and the ink driven into its fibers, the physical trace of one pass through the press; a chair keeps the smoothing of an arm where a hand returned to the same place for years. Neither was staged. Both record use. It is the thread that runs through this journal, from the way we approach restoration to what we have called the Afterlife of Objects: the object outlasts the moment of its making and carries the evidence forward.

Fricano's career is a long argument for that idea. Legacy, in his work, looks less like scale than continuity: the press, the bench, the same method repeated until it becomes a discipline. What remains is not spectacle but care made visible, pressure held in paper and the persistence of a hand. Some makers' names travel widely and some do not. The work still shapes the hands it passes through.

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Object in this Journal

Portrait by Frans Hals, an intaglio print by Tom S. Fricano, signed in pencil and inscribed by the artist. This object remains in the Acanthus archive.

For a restored object that carries the same discipline of the hand, see The Juniper Crest, an Eastlake oak armchair documented and rebuilt for daily use.

See the collection's antique writing desks and secretaries.

‍Related reading

Käthe Kollwitz and the Afterlife of Compassion and Reading Furniture Like a Text.

Thoughtfully Collected. Quietly Shared.

Editorial Note

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division holds five works by Tom S. Fricano (Fine Prints; call no. FP-XX-F897, nos. 1–5), each signed and dated in pencil and acquired through the Pennell Fund. They are catalogued in Karen F. Beall, American Prints in the Library of Congress (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970): Spirit of Motion (1954, color woodcut; Purchase Prize, National Exhibition of Prints, 1955), Young Maiden Among Demons (1958, color woodcut), Sea Storm (1959, color woodcut), Annunciation (1959, color woodcut), and Umbria, no. 1 (1961, color cardboard cut).

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