In 2009 Frank Creber was appointed Director of Visual Arts for Water City Festival, leading on a programme of collaborative, educational and exhibition events, which to date have involved over 300 children and 40 Artists.
In 2005 Frank Creber was appointed the official artist in residence until 2012 for Water City, an ambitious new re-development programme centred around a network of local waterways in east London. Extending from the Olympic Park in the north to East India Dock in the south, the East End is once again being subjected to the force of rapid urban renewal which Creber is recording through drawings and paintings as the project develops; a project driven by a vision to create a true legacy for east London, both physical and social.
But as an artist with over twenty years experience of working within community groups in a deprived neighbourhood in Bow, Creber is equally committed to making works that explore a deeply urban affair between a new world created in the pursuit of progress and modernity and the community that it is setting out to serve. A community whose optimism is by no means universal because they have seen before that the developers’ bulldozers can just as easily destroy the inner-city infrastructure geared to serving local needs.
Creber often allows his imagination to float high above the city looking down on figures in the foreground that cavort on scaffold structures set against a pattern of roads, the Millennium Dome, housing and construction sites of the cityscape below that provide a metaphoric embodiment of individual defiance and bloody-mindedness. They are apart from the turmoil being created around them. Alternatively, he reflects the fears of the community by presenting a city terrorised by the developer; a city in which older buildings and older communities struggle to hold their own against the forces of change.
A key to the relationship that Frank Creber has to the East End and its community lies in his role as Creative Director at the celebrated Bromley by Bow Centre where he was one of the founding artists in 1986.
Frank was born in 1959 and trained at University of Newcastle upon Tyne (B.A in Painting 1981) and Chelsea College of Art (M.A. in Painting 1987) and he has collected a number of prestigious awards: the Herbert Read Fellowship at Chelsea, Barclays Bank Young Painters Award and the Pickering Fellowship at Kingston.
In 2008 Frank Creber was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, for his work in Community Arts with Young People.
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FRANK CREBER
CURRICULUM VITAE
Born: 1959
Employment
2009-to present Visual Arts Director, Water City Festival.
2000-Present Creative Director, led on development of community enterprises, and created “Signs of life” youth Arts enterprise, Bromley By Bow Centre
1995 Project manager, responsibility for development of Bromley by Bow gardens, 2-acre Local Park, design, build and maintenance by local communities
1990 Project manager, responsibilities for disability project, youth project and community arts exhibitions and workshops
1985 Artist and Tutor Bromley By Bow Centre.
Specific community arts projects
2001 Roundabout project with Leaside Regeneration, local community consultation led by local people
1999 The River Within, playground design and build with young people, in partnership with the Atomic Weapons Establishment and the Institute of Child Health
1997 Conference, plan and implement Art and Health projects, sponsored by the Kingsfund
1993 Community art show, “Inner City Blues”, Barbican Concourse Gallery
Education
1981 B.A. Degree in fine art, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
1986 M.A. Degree in Painting, Chelsea, London
Exhibitions
2010 Solo show, Café 88, Wigmore St London
2010 Group Show, Conduit, Smokehouse Gallery, London
2010 Group Show, La Tuerte, Madrid, Spain
2010 Solo show, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London
2010 Group Show, Chainstore, London
2008 Group Show, The Great Purpose, London
2008 Group Show, New English Art Club, London
2008 Solo Show, Art Space Gallery, London
2007 Group show, Picker gallery, Kingston upon Thames
2007 Group show, Art Space gallery, London
2006 Solo Show, Art Space Gallery, London
2004 Solo Show, Art Space Gallery, London
2003 Solo Show, Greenham Arts, Newbury
2002 Solo Show, Turtle Arts, Nottingham
2002 Solo Show, Art House, Peterborough
1998 Solo Show, Arthur Andersen, London
1992 Solo Show, Sue Williams Gallery, London
1991 Solo Show, Sue Williams Gallery, London
1989 Artist of the day, Flowers East
Awards Fellowships
1988 Picker Fellowship, Kingston University
1987 Barclays Bank Young Painters award
1986 Herbert Read Fellowship, Chelsea School of art
2007 Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Works in Collections
Unilever PLC, IBM, Arthur Andersen, Art for Hospitals, Stanhope construction, Mother and Children’s Unit Mildmay Mission Hospital, Kingston University.