Louis Fratino & James Hannaham In Conversation

May 5, 2026 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Dock 72, Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1 Dock 72 Wy, Brooklyn, NY 11205

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Background in various oranges textured like a painting. At top left corner is a black and white photo of Louis Fratino with dark hair, round glasses, partially unzipped collared jacket standing in the center of the frame. There is a body of water behind him and a building. Top right in light yellow text is the event title, event date/time and location. Bottom left is the Pratt fine arts logo in light yellow. Bottom right is a photo of James Hannaham, brightly lit and wearing glasses and a grey sweater. The room behind him has large windows on the left-hand side and the ceiling is greyish.

Pratt Fine Arts and the Writing Department are delighted to welcome Louis Fratino to our MFA studios at Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a conversation with James Hannaham.

Brooklyn-based artist, Louis Fratino (b. 1993, Annapolis, MD), adapts the visual languages of European and American Modernism to contemplate the beauty and queerness in the gestures and experiences of the everyday—in nature, in the home, and in one’s own self-conception.

Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2015). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014.

A selection of Fratino’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sketchbooks are currently featured in conversation with works by Matisse from the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art in the exhibition Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, on view at the museum through September 6, 2026. In 2024, Fratino’s paintings were featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. That same year, his first institutional solo exhibition, Louis Fratino: Satura, was held at the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, accompanied by a fully illustrated monograph published by Mousse Publishing.

Fratino’s work is included in major institutional collections, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Christien Sveaas Art Foundation, Oslo, Norway; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

James Hannaham is a writer, a visual artist, or both. His novel Delicious Foods won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has shown text-based work at The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Open Source Gallery, and won Best in Show at Main Street Arts’ 2020 exhibit Biblio Spectaculum. In 2021 he released Pilot Impostor, a multigenre book inspired by an anthology of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry. His third novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, won the Ferro-Grumley Award from the Publishing Triangle, a second Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a Kirkus Best Book of 2022, an LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and another New York Times Notable Book. He co-founded the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them until 2002. His arts criticism once appeared regularly in the Village Voice, and still does occasionally in 4Columns. He holds a BA in Art from Yale and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. He recently won a Guggenheim fellowship.

This event is open to the public.