TESTIMONIALS 

"Ellen Frank’s wonderful series of paintings, Cities of Peace encourages us to acknowledge the grandeur of humankind’s creative powers, and the triumph of hope over the forces of darkness and entropy. These paintings are such exceptional communicative as well as aesthetic artifacts, and their wide visibility is a most salutary prospect."

– Jeff Spurr, Harvard University, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Fogg Museum

“My friend Ellen Frank is doing wonderful peace work in many places. As the Founder and Artistic Director of Cities of Peace Illuminated, she continues the legacy of her own mother's courageous work to bring UNESCO into the Los Angeles public schools in the 1950’s: ‘only with universal, international understanding can there be any hope for an enduring world of peace.” Cities of Peace Illuminated affirms understanding as the prerequisite to peace. “

- Abigail Disney

"There's a sense of serenity and contemplation in these pictures. The paintings are not frenetic and they're not harrowing, reflecting its particular history and situation and designing a composition unique to it. This points to the essential truth of CITIES OF PEACE to its passionate, yet carefully reasoned, faithfulness to the cities the work honors."

-Peter Trippi, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine

"Yes, art matters in conflict. That is why I find the Ellen Frank Cities of Peace Project so important. Because Cities of Peace focuses on cities. Because Cities of Peace identifies art as the ultimate peace weapon. Art comes before diplomacy." 

–Jean-Marie Guehénno, Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, United Nations

"Promoting positive inter-cultural dialogue, CITIES OF PEACE bridges gaps in religion, ethnicity and aesthetic ideas, and testifies to the transformative power of the collaborative artistic enterprise to bring forth positive social change."

- Jenean Partridge Paschalidis, Senior Advisor, Enterprise Risk, UNICEF

“The star of the exhibition is easily Ellen Frank, who is showing gemlike examples in gold leaf, copper and egg tempera from her Persian Studies series along with the massive Language of Women…. This major comment on archaic styles and on the continuity of potent expression features a gold form that blends the lushness of metallic colors with the commanding presence of a devotional object.”

- Phyllis Braff, The New York Times (2003)

“Cities of Peace at “Art as an Instrument of Peace” (Summer Institute Program 2006) establishes the bedrock necessary to build a culture of peace.  At age 26, Ellen Frank wrote an award-winning book on consciousness, language and architecture. She was speaking of writers then; how fitting that her words, in my rendition, reflect her own place now as an international figure:

Ellen Frank’s paintings build as with an old language, as with aged stones but build so that viewers will respect and acknowledge the past and the necessity for our care in preserving it.  The architecture of cities is the only art object we actually live in.  However, we live in another construction – we do not commonly call it art – also of our own making:  Consciousness. Ellen Frank’s Cities of Peace is a gesture towards that.

Ellen Frank’s lifetime of work provides steadfast commitment to the arts as tools that affect our very behavior, tools for transformative change.”

- Faye Feller, Executive Director, National Association of Women for the Arts, Co-Chair, NGO Education Committee, United Nations

“Frank’s work is emphatically contemporary; it pits the ephemerality of life against the still moment of art while affirming the value of both.”

- Robert Pincus, The Los Angeles Times

“These paintings suggest a certain purity and timelessness, displaying a sensuous power that threatens to overwhelm out memory.”

- Arts Magazine

“Ellen Frank displays the gifts of the poet, the intellect of the philosopher, the scholarship of the art historian and mythologist…

Hers is clearly a diligent and impressive craft, in the tradition of the early medieval artists who painted with gold to capture light and holiness on their canvasses, as well as of the monks who did the illuminated manuscripts.

Always under the glitter of “Illuminations,” there is the gold of meaning and significance.”

- Rose Slivka, From the Studio, The East Hampton Star

“Ellen Frank’s is an art of border- crossings—crossings between a visual and a verbal order; crossings through diverse layers of time; crossings that suggest entrances to other realms. Frank’s critical investigation in her book Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradition set the terms for her subsequent art and endowed her painting with a conceptual depth. Frank correspondingly introduces textual concerns—history, memory, temporality—into visual space, and so locates herself at these same borders. Her work provokes us to hope for the recovery of some originary presence and of a painting’s ability to recapture an earlier existence.”

- Herbert S. Lindenberger, Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities,Stanford University

“I have just gone to see Ellen Frank’s show: I loved every bit. It’s the intelligence of the quotations, the power of the technique, the persuasiveness of the medium, and the just plain beauty of the images. Bravissima!”

- Leonard Barkan, Princeton University, Director, Society of Fellows

“Thank you for letting me see Ellen Frank’s breathtakingly beautiful illuminations. They are an amazing achievement… and spectacular work.”

- Simon Schama, Professor of History, Columbia University

“Cities of Peace looks spectacular, ambitious, and against the grain of what is in the contemporary art world. I am intrigued by the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual/ philosophical impulses that have produced this work.”

-Daniel Rosenfeld, Carolyn Muzzy Director, Colby College Museum of Art

“Cities of Peace! Breathtaking.”

- Sepia International

“Ellen Frank is one of those rare individuals whose unparalleled techniques, especially in unusual and endangered art forms, draws a straight line between her imagination and its expression. She expresses her rare talents in her paintings as well as in her critically acclaimed writing. The amazed delight this project is bound to elicit ensures that Ellen Frank’s work will last as long as the best examples of any great civilization can endure.”

- Marshall Yaeger, Anchor- International Foundation

“There are uncountable connections between the arts and peace. Good art in and of itself promotes ethics, intercultural dialogue and inner calm - all so overlooked in our world as tools, as language, for peace and peaceful co-existence.

Ellen Frank’s art – Cities of Peace in particular – superbly promotes such common values of humanity.  Cities of Peace does so without being explicitly political or displaying slogans, without being anti- but exclusively for life, peace, humanity and, I must add, unique in its techniques and genuine beauty. 

Cities of Peace elicits positive energy while making a lasting impression as low-voiced contrasts to wars, to bombs, to destruction. Cities of Peace should not only be exhibited in New York or Geneva but in war zones, in schools and art halls, where they could give hope and inspiration.”

- Jan Oberg, Executive Director, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Lund, Sweden

“CITIES OF PEACE is infused with an ethic of interdependence. It assumes that both the suffering and the wisdom of each of the world's cities are legacies shared by all of humankind. In fact, these paintings draw us in to their worlds of meaning, beckoning us to recognize and act on the fact of interdependence." 

- Cynthia Cohen, Director, Peacebuilding and the Arts, Brandeis University