FRANK
Jennifer Morales
Mixed media
$150
Artist Statement
As a gender-queer person, I was struck by all the gender ambiguity in the biography of Frances Folsom Cleveland. Frances was called “Frank” by her family, after an uncle. She later changed it to “Frances” to sound more feminine. A college roommate, Kate Willard, wrote Frank passionate letters, begging her not to get married, saying, “[I am] only disappointed because I had thought of another life and love for you. I don’t know what, only not this …”
“This” was a marriage to President Grover Cleveland, a man who had known Frances since her birth and was 27 years her senior. He had a patronizingly late-Victorian concept of how his wife should act, and her solid intelligence and political acumen were kept under tight wraps. She was often lonely because he spent much of his free time in the woods with his male friends, fishing and hunting.
Five years after Grover Cleveland’s death, Frank married again, to an art professor who was known around his college campus for wearing very dapper suits and who relaxed at night by crocheting.
I wonder about all this, about what Frances Cleveland really wanted out of life and who she wanted to be. We will never know, because she dutifully maintained the reticent façade demanded of a well-off woman of her time. Please lift the veil and see if you can find her.
About the Artist
Jennifer Morales is a queer poet, fiction writer, and performance artist based in rural Wisconsin whose work wrestles with questions of gender, identity, complicity, and harm. She is a graduate of Beloit College and Antioch University-Los Angeles. Jennifer’s first book, Meet Me Halfway (UW Press 2015), a short story collection about life in hyper-segregated Milwaukee, was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year,” among other honors.
Recent publications include “Cousins,” a short story in Milwaukee Noir (Akashic 2019), and “The Boy Without a Bike,” a story in Cutting Edge, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Akashic 2019). Jennifer is president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center and of Viroqua Area Pride, both based in Viroqua, Wis.